Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 40

“He had a heart attack?” I said, echoing the last words I’d heard, as if I hadn’t missed something crucial.

“Oh, Mary, he’s dead.” My mother started to cry. “I really did love him once,” she said.

As my mother continued to speak, I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the floor of the landing. I dropped the phone, let it hang on its cord, and waited.

Sometime in the afternoon of Saturday, September 26, 1981, one of my grandparents called an ambulance. I didn’t know it then, but my father had been critically ill for three weeks. It was the first time anybody had called for medical help.

My grandmother had been a regular at Jamaica Hospital and Booth Memorial Hospital and Medical Center. My dad, too, had been admitted to Jamaica a few times. All of my grandparents’ children had been born there, so the family had a long-standing relationship with the staff and administration. My grandparents had donated millions of dollars to Jamaica in particular, and in 1975 the Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation had been named for my grandmother. As for Booth Memorial, my grandmother was heavily involved with the Salvation Army volunteers there—and it was also where I’d spent much of my childhood because of my severe asthma. A single phone call would have guaranteed the best treatment for their son at either facility. No call was made. The ambulance took my father to the Queens Hospital Center in Jamaica. No one went with him.

After the ambulance left, my grandparents called their other four children, but only Donald and Elizabeth could be reached. By the time they arrived in the late afternoon, the information coming from the hospital made it clear that my father’s situation was grave. Still nobody went.

Donald called my mother to let her know what was going on but kept getting a busy signal. He got in touch with our superintendent and told him to buzz her on the intercom.

Mom immediately called the House.

“The doctors think Freddy probably won’t make it, Linda,” Donald told her. My mother had had no idea that Dad was even sick.

“Would it be all right if I came to the House so I can be there if there’s any news?” She didn’t want to be alone.

When my mother arrived a short time later, my grandparents were sitting alone by the phone in the library; Donald and Elizabeth had gone to the movies.

While Mom sat with my grandparents, nobody said much. A couple of hours later, Donald and Elizabeth returned. When they were told there was no news, Donald left, and Elizabeth, nearing forty, made a cup of tea and went upstairs to her room. As my mother was getting ready to leave, the phone rang. It was the hospital. Dad had been pronounced dead at 9:20 p.m. He was forty-two.

Nobody thought to come get me from school, but arrangements were made for me to take a bus the next morning. Dunn drove me to the Greyhound station in Hartford, where I boarded a bus bound for the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan. After picking me up in the city, my mother, brother, and I drove to the House, where the rest of the family was already gathered in the breakfast room to discuss the funeral arrangements. Maryanne and her son, my cousin David, were there; my uncle Robert and Blaine; and Donald, Ivana, almost eight months pregnant with Ivanka, and their three-year-old son, Donny. Nobody said much to my mother, brother, or me. There were some attempts at forced heartiness, mostly by Rob, but they didn’t land well and soon stopped. My grandfather and Maryanne spoke in hushed tones. My grandmother fretted about what she was going to wear to the wake; my grandfather had picked out a black pantsuit for her, and she wasn’t pleased.

In the afternoon, we drove over to R. Stutzmann & Son Funeral Home, a small place in Queens Village about ten minutes from the House, for a private viewing. Before going into the main room, where the coffin was already perched on its stand, I asked my uncle Robert if I could discuss something with him. I pulled him into a small alcove down the hall from the visitation room. “I want to see Dad’s body.” I saw no reason not to be direct. I didn’t have a lot of time.

“You can’t, Mary. It’s impossible.”

“Rob, it’s important.” It wasn’t for religious reasons or because I thought that was how things were done; I had never been to a funeral before and knew nothing about protocol. Although I knew I needed to see my father, I couldn’t articulate why. How could I say, “I don’t believe he’s dead. There’s no reason for me to believe that. I didn’t even know he was sick”? I could only say, “I need to see him.”

Rob paused and finally said, “No, Honeybunch. Your dad is being cremated, and his body hasn’t been prepared. It would be terrible for that to be the last memory you have of him.”

“It doesn’t matter.” I felt desperate in a way I didn’t understand. Rob looked down at me and then turned to leave. I stepped in front of him. “Please, Rob.”

He paused again, then began walking down the hall. “Come on,” he said. “We should go in.”

On Monday, in between the two sessions of the wake, the family went back to the House for lunch. On the way, Donald and Ivana had gone to the supermarket and picked up large quantities of prepackaged cold cuts that Maryanne and Elizabeth laid out on the breakfast room table and we ate or ignored in relative silence.

I had no appetite and wasn’t part of the conversation, so I left the breakfast room to wander around the house, as I’d used to do when I was younger. I walked to the back stairs across from the library doorway and caught a glimpse of Donald holding the