Too Much and Never Enough, стр. 54
On June 11, 1999, Fritz called to tell me our grandfather had been taken to Long Island Jewish Medical Center, another Queens hospital my grandparents had patronized in recent years. He said it was likely the end.
I drove the ten minutes from my house and found that the room was already full. Gam sat in the only chair near the bed; Elizabeth stood next to her, holding my grandfather’s hand.
After saying hello, I stood by the window next to Robert’s wife, Blaine. She said, “We’re supposed to be in London with Prince Charles.” I realized she was talking to me—something she rarely did.
“Oh,” I said.
“He invited us to one of his polo matches. I can’t believe we had to cancel.” She sounded exasperated and made no effort to lower her voice.
I could have topped that story. In a week I was supposed to be getting married on a beach in Maui. Nobody in the family knew; they’d always been spectacularly uninterested in my personal life (when necessary, I asked a guy friend to accompany me to any family occasion that required a plus one) and never asked about my boyfriends or relationships.
A couple of years earlier, Gam and I had been talking about Princess Diana’s funeral, and when she had said with some vehemence, “It’s a disgrace they’re letting that little faggot Elton John sing at the service,” I’d realized it was better that she didn’t know I was living with and engaged to a woman.
Seeing how serious my grandfather’s condition was, I had a terrible feeling that when I got home, I’d have to break the news to my fiancée that, after months of planning and overcoming several logistical nightmares, our mostly secret wedding would have to be postponed.
I noticed a hush in the room, as if everybody had run out of small talk at the same time. We were reduced for the moment to listening to my grandfather’s uneven breathing: a ragged, uncertain inhalation, followed by an unnatural pause for longer than seemed safe until finally he exhaled.
C
HAPTER
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The Only Currency
Fred Trump died on June 25, 1999. The following day, his obituary was published in the New York Times under the banner “Fred C. Trump, Postwar Master Builder of Housing for Middle Class, Dies at 93.” The obituary writer made a point of contrasting Fred’s status as “a self-made man” with “his flamboyant son Donald.” My grandfather’s propensity for picking up unused nails at his construction sites to hand back to his carpenters the next day was noted before the details of his birth. The Times also repeated the family line that Donald had built his own business with minimal help from my grandfather—“a small amount of money”—a statement that the paper itself would refute twenty years later.
We sat in the library, each with our own copy of the Times. Robert was raked over the coals by his siblings for having told the Times that my grandfather’s estate was worth between $250 million and $300 million. “Never, never give them numbers,” Maryanne lectured him, as if he were a stupid kid. He stood there shamefaced, cracking his knuckles and bouncing on the balls of his feet, just as my grandfather used to do, as if suddenly imagining the ensuing tax bill. The valuation was absurdly low—eventually we would learn that the empire was probably worth four times that—but Maryanne and Donald would never have admitted that it was even that much.
Later we stood upstairs in the Madison Room at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the most exclusive and expensive bereavement services provider in the city, smiling and shaking hands as a seemingly endless line of visitors passed through.
Overall, more than eight hundred people moved through the rooms. Some were there to pay their respects, including rival real estate developers such as Sam LeFrak, New York governor George Pataki, former Senator Al D’Amato, and comedian and future Celebrity Apprentice contestant Joan Rivers. The rest were most likely there to catch a glimpse of Donald.
On the day of the funeral, Marble Collegiate Church was filled to capacity. During the service, from beginning to end, everyone had a role to play. It was all extremely well choreographed. Elizabeth read my grandfather’s “favorite poem,” and the rest of the siblings gave eulogies, as did my brother, who spoke on behalf of my dad, and my cousin David, who represented the grandchildren. Mostly they told stories about my grandfather, although my brother was the only one who came close to humanizing him. For the most part, in ways both oblique and direct, the emphasis was on my grandfather’s material success, his “killer” instinct, and his talent for saving a buck. Donald was the only one to deviate from the script. In a cringe-inducing turn, his eulogy devolved into a paean to his own greatness. It was so embarrassing that Maryanne later told her son not to allow any of her siblings to speak at her funeral.
Rudolph Giuliani, New York City’s mayor at the time, also spoke.
When the service was over, the six oldest grandchildren (Tiffany was too young) accompanied the casket to the hearse as honorary pallbearers, which meant, as was often the case in our family, that others did the heavy lifting while we got the credit.
All of the streets from Fifth Avenue and 45th Street to the Midtown Tunnel more than sixteen blocks away had been closed to cars and pedestrians, so our motorcade, with a police escort, slid easily out of the city. It was a quick trip to All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village, Queens, for the burial.
We drove back to the city just as quickly, but with less fanfare, for lunch at Donald’s apartment. Afterward, I accompanied my grandmother back to the House. The two of us sat in the library and chatted for a while. She seemed tired but relieved. It had been a very long day; a very