Chapter Eight
Escape Velocity

I sat at the dining room table with the shoe in front of me, trying to figure out what the point of it was. I had looked through the remaining boxes under the tree, thinking that perhaps the shoe's twin had been wrapped separately, but no, there was just the one—a gold lame shoe with a four-inch heel filled with hard candy. Both the individual candies and the shoe itself were wrapped in cellophane. Where had this thing come from? I wondered. Had it been a door prize or a party favor from a luncheon?

Donald came through the pantry from the kitchen. As he passed me, he asked, "What's that?"

"It's a present from you."

"Really?" He looked at it for a second. "Ivana!" he shouted into the foyer. She was standing on the other side of the Christmas tree near the living room. "Ivana!"

"What is it, Donald?"

"This is great." He pointed at the shoe, and she smiled. Maybe he thought it was real gold.

It had all started in 1977 with a three-pack of Bloomie's underwear, retail $12, my very first Christmas present from Donald and his new wife, Ivana. That same year, they had given Fritz a leather-bound journal. It looked as though it were meant for somebody older, but it was really nice, and I felt a bit slighted until we realized that it was two years out of date. At least the underwear wouldn't expire.

On holidays, Donald and Ivana pulled up to the House in either an expensive sports car or a chauffeur-driven limo that was even longer than my grandfather's. They swept into the foyer like socialites, Ivana in her furs and silk and outrageous hair and makeup, Donald in his expensive three-piece suits and shiny shoes, everyone else looking conservative and unfashionable by comparison.

I grew up thinking that Donald had struck out on his own and single-handedly built the business that had turned my family name into a brand and that my grandfather, provincial and miserly, cared only about making and keeping money. On both counts, the truth was vastly different. A New York Times article published on October 2, 2018, that uncovered the vast amounts of alleged fraud and quasi-legal and illegal activities my family had engaged in over the course of several decades included this paragraph:

Fred Trump and his companies also began extending large loans and lines of credit to Donald Trump. Those loans dwarfed what the other Trumps got, the flow so constant at times that it was as if Donald Trump had his own Money Store. Consider 1979, when he borrowed $1.5 million in January, $65,000 in February, $122,000 in March, $150,000 in April, $192,000 in May, $226,000 in June, $2.4 million in July and $40,000 in August, according to records filed with New Jersey casino regulators.

In 1976, when Roy Cohn suggested that Donald and Ivana sign a prenuptial agreement, the terms set for Ivana's compensation were based on Fred's wealth because at the time Donald's father was his only source of income. I heard from my grandmother that, in addition to alimony and child support as well as the condo, the prenup, at Ivana's insistence, included a "rainy day" fund of $150,000. My parents' divorce agreement had also been based on my grandfather's wealth, but Ivana's $150,000 bonus was worth almost twenty-one years of the $600-per-month checks my mother received for child support and alimony.

Before Ivana, there had always been a sameness to the holidays that made them blur together. Christmas when I was five was indistinguishable from Christmas when I was eleven. The routine never varied. We'd enter the House through the front door at 1:00 p.m., dozens of packages in tow, handshakes and air kisses all around, then gather in the living room for shrimp cocktail. Like the front door, we used the living room only twice a year. Dad came and went, but I have no recollection of his being there one way or another.

Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners were identical, although one Christmas, Gam had the temerity to make roast beef instead of turkey. It was a meal everybody liked, but Donald and Robert were pissed off. Gam spent the whole meal with her head bowed, hands in her lap. Just when you thought the subject was dropped for good, one of them would say some version of "Jesus, Mom, I can't believe you didn't make turkey."

Once Ivana became a part of the family, she joined Donald at the power center of the table, where he sat at my grandfather's right hand, his only equal. The people nearest to them (Maryanne and Robert and Ivana) formed a claque with one mission: to prop Donald up, follow his lead in conversation, and defer to him as though nobody was as important as he was. I think that initially, it was simply an expedient—Maryanne and Robert had learned early on that there was no point in contradicting their father's obvious preference. "I never challenged my father," Maryanne said. "Ever." It was easier to go along for the ride. Donald's chiefs of staff are prime examples of this phenomenon. John Kelly, at least for a while, and Mick Mulvaney, without any reservations at all, would behave the same way—until they were ousted for not being sufficiently "loyal." That's how it always works with the sycophants. First they remain silent no matter what outrages are committed; then they make themselves complicit by not acting. Ultimately, they find they are expendable when Donald needs a scapegoat.

Over time, the discrepancy between Fred's treatment of Donald and his other children became painfully clear. It was simpler for Rob and Maryanne to toe the party line in the hope that they wouldn't get treated any worse, which seems to be the same calculation Republicans in Congress make every day now. They also knew what had happened to my father when he failed to meet Fred's expectations. The rest of us at the other end of the table were superfluous; our job was to fill the cheap seats.

A year after the gold lame shoe, the gift basket I received from Donald and Ivana hit the trifecta: it was an obvious regift, it was useless, and it demonstrated Ivana's penchant for cellophane. After unwrapping it, I noticed, among the tin of gourmet sardines, the box of table water crackers, the jar of vermouth-packed olives, and a salami, a circular indentation in the tissue paper that filled the bottom of the basket where another jar had once been. My cousin David walked by and, pointing at the empty space, asked, "What was that?"

"I have no idea. Something that goes with these, I guess," I said, holding up the box of crackers.

"Probably caviar," he said, laughing. I shrugged, having no idea what caviar was.

I grabbed the basket handle and walked toward the pile of presents I'd stacked next to the stairs. I passed Ivana and my grandmother on the way, lifted the basket, said, "Thanks, Ivana," and put it on the floor.

"Is that yours?"

At first I thought she was talking about the gift basket, but she was referring to the copy of Omni magazine that was sitting on top of the stack of gifts I'd already opened. Omni, a magazine of science and science fiction that had launched in October of that year, was my new obsession. I had just picked up the December issue and brought it with me to the House in the hope that between shrimp cocktail and dinner I'd have a chance to finish reading it.

"Oh, yeah."

"Bob, the publisher, is a friend of mine."

"No way! I love this magazine."

"I'll introduce you. You'll come into the city and meet him."

It wasn't quite as seismic as being told I was going to meet Isaac Asimov, but it was pretty close. "Wow. Thanks."

I filled a plate and went upstairs to my dad's room, where he'd been all day, too sick to join us. He was sitting up, listening to his portable radio. I handed the plate to him, but he put it on the small bedside table, not interested. I told him about Ivana's generous offer.

"Wait a second; who does she want to introduce you to?"

I would never forget the name. I'd looked at the magazine's masthead right after speaking to Ivana, and there he was: Bob Guccione, Publisher.

"You're going to meet the guy who publishes Penthouse?" Even at thirteen I knew what Penthouse was. There was no way we could be talking about the same person. Dad chuckled and said, "I don't think that's such a good idea." And all of a sudden, neither did I.

It was impossible to laugh about the presents my mother received. Why she was still expected to attend family holidays years after her divorce from my father was a mystery, but why she went was an even bigger mystery. Clearly, the Trumps didn't want her there any more than she wanted to be there. Some of the presents they gave her were nice enough, but they always came from lesser stores than the gifts for Ivana and Robert's wife, Blaine. Worse, many of them had clearly been regifted. A handbag she got from Ivana one year bore a luxury brand but contained a used Kleenex.

After dinner and the opening of presents, we split up-some of us went to the kitchen, some to the backyard, and the rest of us to the library, where I sat on the floor near the door with my legs crossed. From a distance I watched whatever Godzilla movie or football game Donald and Rob happened to have on. After a while, I noticed my mother wasn't around. I didn't worry at first, but when she didn't return, I went to look for her. I checked the kitchen but found only my grandmother and aunts. I went out to the backyard, where my brother and David were throwing a football around. When I asked Fritz where she was, he said, "I have no idea," clearly not interested. With time, I would know where to find her without needing to ask, but the first few times I felt panic.

Mom was in the dining room, sitting alone at the table. By then the sideboard had been cleared, and the only evidence of the meal was a few stray cloth napkins on the floor. I stood in the doorway, hoping she would notice me and that my presence would set her back into motion. I was afraid to say anything, not wanting to disturb her. While the clatter of dishes and talk about leftovers and ice cream cake filtered out from the kitchen, I approached the mahogany table in the fading afternoon light. The chandelier had been extinguished, but I wished it had been even darker so that I didn't have to see my mother's face, how stricken she looked.

Careful not to touch her, I sat in the chair next to her. There was no comfort I could give or take except in solidarity.

Eight months before the gift of underwear, Donald and Ivana were married at Marble Collegiate Church and held their reception at the 21 Club. Mom, Fritz, and I were relegated to the cousins' table, and Dad wasn't there. The lie the family told was that Dad had been asked to be Donald's best man and his MC at the reception (a role Joey Bishop actually filled) but the family had decided he needed to stay in Florida in order to take care of Uncle Vic, Gam's brother-in-law. The truth was, my grandfather simply didn't want him at the wedding and he had been told not to come.

While Donald was cruising Manhattan looking for foreclosures, I was losing tens of thousands of dollars almost every week. On Fridays after school, I went to a friend's house and we played our version of Monopoly: double houses and hotels, double the money. Our sessions were marathons spanning the entire weekend. One game could last anywhere from thirty minutes to several hours. The only constant in all of that gaming was my performance: I lost every single time I played.

In order to give me a fighting chance (and my friend something of a challenge), I was allowed to borrow increasingly huge sums of money from the bank and eventually from my opponent. We kept a running total of my enormous debt by writing the sums I owed in long columns of numbers on the inside of the cover.

Despite my terminally poor performance, I never once changed my strategy; I bought every Atlantic City property I landed on and put houses and hotels on my properties even when I had no chance of recouping my investment. I doubled and tripled down no matter how badly I was losing. It was a great joke between me and my friends that I, the granddaughter and niece of real estate tycoons, was terrible at real estate. It turned out that Donald and I had something in common after all.

Since my father's death, Donald has suggested that "they" (meaning he and my grandfather) should have "let" Freddy do what he loved and excelled at (flying) rather than force him to do something he hated and was bad at (real estate). But there's no evidence to suggest that my father lacked the skills to run Trump Management, just as there is none to suggest that Donald had them.

One night in 1978, Dad woke up in his West Palm Beach apartment with excruciating stomach pains. He managed to drag himself to his car and drove to the emergency room. He later told Mom that when he had gotten to the hospital, he hadn't gone in right away. He had stayed in his car, wondering if he should bother. Perhaps it would be simpler, he had thought, if it just ended. The only thing that had forced him to get help was the thought of me and Fritz.

Dad was very sick and was transferred to a Miami hospital, where the doctors diagnosed him with a heart defect that required surgery. Fred told Maryanne to fly to Florida, get him out of the hospital, and bring him back to New York. It would be my father's last trip north. After three years in Florida, he was going home.

In New York, doctors discovered that Dad had a faulty mitral valve and his heart had become dangerously enlarged. He needed to undergo an experimental procedure to replace it with a healthy valve from a pig's heart.

When Mom and I got to the House to see Dad the day before his surgery, Elizabeth was already there, sitting with him in his tiny childhood bedroom, which we called "the Cell." He lay in his cot, and I kissed him on the cheek but didn't sit next to him for fear of breaking him. I'd seen Dad sick before—with pneumonia, with jaundice, with drunkenness, with despair—but his condition now was shocking. Not yet forty, he looked like a worn-out eighty-

year-old man. He told us about the procedure and the pig valve, and Mom said, "Freddy, it's a good thing you're not kosher." We all laughed.

It was a long recovery, and Dad stayed at the House to recuperate. A year after the surgery, he was better than he had been, but he would never be well enough to live on his own again. Part of the obstacle to that may have been financial. He started working for my grandfather again but this time on a maintenance crew. It wasn't surprising that apart from a few stints in rehab to dry out, he had never stopped drinking. He told me once that one of his doctors had warned him, "If you have another drink, it's going to kill you." Even open-heart surgery wasn't enough to stop him.

That Thanksgiving, Dad joined us for the first time since he'd moved back to New York. He sat with me at Gam's end of the table, pale and thin as a specter.

Halfway through the meal, Gam started choking. "You okay, Mom?" Dad asked. Nobody else seemed to notice. As she continued to struggle, a couple of people at the other end of the table looked up to see what was going on but then looked down at their plates and continued eating.

"Come on," Dad said as he put a hand under Gam's elbow and gently helped her to her feet. He led her to the kitchen, where we heard some shuffling and the distressing sound of my grandmother's grunts as Dad performed the Heimlich maneuver; he'd learned it when he had been a volunteer ambulance driver in the late 1960s and early '70s.

When they returned, there was a desultory round of applause. "Good job, Freddy," Rob said, as if my father had just killed a mosquito.

Donald was becoming a constant presence even when he wasn't in the House. Every time my father wanted to go to the kitchen or back to his room, he had to pass through the gauntlet of magazine covers and newspaper articles that littered the breakfast room table. Ever since the 1973 lawsuit, Donald had been a staple of the New York tabloids, and my grandfather had collected every single article that mentioned his name.

The Grand Hyatt deal Donald was working on when Dad moved back to the House was merely a more complex version of the 1972 partnership my grandfather had formed with Donald in New Jersey. The Grand Hyatt was initially made possible because of my grandfather's association with New York City mayor Abe Beame. Fred also contributed generously to both the mayor's and Governor Hugh Carey's campaigns. Louise Sunshine, Carey's fundraiser, helped pull the deal together. In order to seal it, Beame offered him a $10-million-a-year tax abatement that would remain in place for forty years. When the demolition of the Commodore Hotel began, the New York press, taking Donald at his word, consistently presented the deal as something Donald had accomplished single-handedly.

Perhaps to bridge the gap that had widened between us since he'd moved back to New York, Dad told me he wanted to throw me a Sweet Sixteen party in May 1981. The Grand Hyatt had had its grand opening a few months earlier, and Dad said he'd ask Donald if we could use one of the smaller ballrooms. Donald, who seemed eager for the chance to show off his new project to the family, readily agreed and even offered him a discount.

Dad told my grandfather about the plans for the party a few days later when the three of us were in the breakfast room, the ubiquitous clippings covering the table. "Fred," he said angrily, "Donald's busy, he doesn't need this bullshit."

The subtext was clear: Donald is important, and he's doing important things; you're not.

I don't know how the situation got resolved, but Dad eventually pulled it off. I was going to have my party.

Most of my guests had arrived and I was standing with a small group of friends when Donald made his entrance. He walked over to us, and instead of saying hello, he spread his arms and said, "Isn't this great?"

We all agreed that it was, indeed, great. I thanked him again for letting us use the hotel, then introduced him to everybody.

"So what'd you think of that lobby? Fantastic, right?"

"Fantastic," I said. My friends nodded.

"Nobody else could have pulled this off. Just look at those windows."

I worried that he might tell us how great the bathroom tiles were next, but he saw my grandparents, shook my hand, kissed me on the cheek, said, "Have fun, Honeybunch," and walked over to them. My dad was sitting a couple of tables away from them, by himself.

When I turned back to my friends, they were staring at me.

"What the hell was that?" one of them asked.

In the summer of 1981, Maryanne drove my father to the Carrier Clinic in Belle Mead, New Jersey, about half an hour from the Bedminster property that Donald would later turn into a golf course. Dad went through the thirty-day program, but he did it reluctantly. At the end of his stay, Maryanne and her second husband, John Barry, picked him up and brought him back to the House, arguably the worst place he could be. When she checked on him the next day, Dad had already started drinking again.

Freddy had lost his home and family, his profession, much of his willpower, and most of his friends. Eventually his parents were the only people left to take care of him. And they resented it. In the end, Freddy's very existence infuriated his father.

Fred's treatment of my father had always served as an object lesson to his other children—a warning. In the end, though, the control became something much different. Fred wielded the complete power of the torturer, but he was ultimately as trapped in the circumstance of Freddy's growing dependence due to his alcoholism and declining health as Freddy was tied to him. Fred had no imagination and no ability to see a way beyond the circumstances he was essentially responsible for having created. The situation was proof that his power had limits.

After I got home from summer camp that August, I announced that I wanted to go to boarding school. I explained to Dad that after ten years at Kew-Forest, the same extremely small school my aunts and uncles had gone to, I was feeling hemmed in and bored. I wanted more of a challenge, a place with a campus, better sports facilities, more opportunities. Dad warned me about the dangers of becoming a small fish in a big pond, but I think he understood that although my stated reasons were all true, I also needed to get away.

The problem was that I had only three weeks to figure out where I wanted to go, fill out applications, and get accepted. Over the last two weeks of August 1981, my mother and I visited almost every boarding school in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

While I waited for the results, we needed to get permission from my grandfather, or at least that's what Dad said.

The two of us stood in front of my grandfather's usual spot on the love seat, and Dad explained what I wanted to do. "What does she want to do that for?" my grandfather asked, as if I weren't standing right in front of him. "Kew-Forest is fine." He'd been on the board there for almost thirty years.

"It's just time for a change. Come on, Pop. It'll be good for her."

My grandfather complained about the extra expense, even though the money would come from my father's trust fund and wouldn't affect him at all, and he reiterated his belief in the superiority of Kew-Forest. But Dad didn't back down.

I don't think my grandfather really cared where I went to school, but I was grateful that Dad had stood by my side once again.

The day before heading to boarding school, I left the apartment at the Highlander and rode my bike to my grandparents' house. I coasted down the driveway, propped my bike against the high brick wall next to the garage, then climbed the stairs to the path leading to the back door.

The backyard was quiet in the early-September afternoon. I jumped up the two steps to the cement patio and rang the doorbell. There was no outdoor furniture, just an empty slab. The only person who'd ever used it when we were younger was my uncle Rob. At one time there had been a couple of wrought-iron chairs out there, and when he was home for the weekend, he'd pull them together, and, using one as a footrest, he'd slather himself with baby oil and prop his folding aluminum tanning reflector under his chin.

Minutes passed. I was about to press the doorbell again when my grandmother finally answered the door. She seemed surprised to see me. I pulled the screen door toward me to enter, but Gam remained in the doorway.

"Hi, Gam. I'm here to see Dad."

Gam stood there wiping her hands on her apron, tense, as if I'd just caught her at something. I reminded her that I was leaving for school the next day. She was quite tall, and with her blond hair swept up and pinned tightly behind her head, she looked more severe than usual. She didn't move to let me in.

"Your father's not home," she said. "I don't know when he'll be back."

I was confused. I knew my father had wanted to see me off—we'd talked about it only a few days before. I assumed that he had forgotten I was coming by. In the last year, he'd often forgotten when we had plans. I wasn't surprised, exactly, but something about it still didn't seem right. Directly above where my grandmother and I stood, the sound of a radio came through the open window of my father's bedroom.

I shrugged at Gam, pretending not to care. "Okay, then, I guess tell him to call me later." I moved toward her for a hug, and she put her arms around me stiffly. When I turned to leave, I heard the door close. I walked down the path and down the stairs to the driveway, got on my bike, and rode home. I left for school the next day. Dad never called me.

I was watching a movie in the brand-new auditorium of the Ethel Walker School when the projector went dark and the lights came up. The students were there to watch The Other Side of the Mountain, an uplifting story about an Olympic skier who becomes paralyzed in a skiing accident. Instead, The Other Side of Midnight—a decidedly different kind of movie with an early rape scene—had been ordered. The faculty were in a bit of a tumult trying to figure out what to do next, while we students thought it was hysterical.

As I sat talking and laughing with some kids from my dorm, I saw Diane Dunn, a phys ed teacher, making her way through the crowd. Dunn was also a counselor at the sailing camp I went to every summer, so I'd known her since I was a little kid. To everyone else at Walker's, she was Miss Dunn, which I found impossible to wrap my head around. At camp she was Dunn and I was Trump, and that's what we continued to call each other. She was largely responsible for my having decided to go to this boarding school, and after I had been there for only two weeks, she was still the only person I really knew.

When she waved me over, I smiled and said, "Hey, Dunn."

"Trump, you need to call home," she said. She had a piece of paper in her fist but didn't give it to me. She looked flustered.

"What's up?"

"You need to call your mother."

"Right now?"

"Yes. If she isn't home, call your grandparents." She was speaking to me as if she'd memorized the lines.

It was almost 10:00 p.m., and I had never called my grandparents so late, but my dad and grandmother were both in the hospital pretty frequently—Dad due to his years of heavy drinking and smoking, and Gam's tendency to break bones fairly often because of her osteoporosis. So I wasn't really worried—or, rather, I didn't think it was anything more serious than usual.

My dorm was adjacent to the auditorium, so I went outside, crossed the oval lawn between them, and climbed the two flights of stairs to my floor. The pay phone hung on the stairwell wall on the landing right next to the door.

I placed a collect call to my mother, but there was no answer, so I dialed the House. Gam answered and accepted the charges—so the emergency wasn't about her. After a quick, muffled "Hello," she immediately handed the phone to my grandfather.

"Yes," he said, brisk and businesslike as usual. For a moment, it was easy to believe that there had been a mistake, that nothing was really wrong. But then something had been urgent enough for me to be pulled out of the auditorium. I had also seen the way Dunn's eyes had widened in panic as she looked for me in the auditorium. It would only occur to me much later that she already knew.

"What's the matter?" I asked.

"Your mother just left," he said. "She should be home in a few minutes." I could picture him in the poorly lit library standing next to the telephone table wearing his starched white shirt, red tie, and navy blue three-piece suit, impatient to be done with me.

"But what's wrong?"

"Your father has been taken to the hospital, but it's nothing to worry about," he said as though reporting the weather.

I could have hung up then. I could have gone back to trying to fit in with my new classmates at my new school.

"Is it his heart?" It was unheard of for me—for anyone but Donald—to challenge my grandfather in any way, but there was obviously a reason I'd been told to call.

"Yes."

"Then it's serious."

"Yes, I would say it's serious." There was a pause during which, perhaps, he was deciding whether to tell me the truth. "Go to sleep," he said finally. "Call your mother in the morning." He hung up.

I stood there in the stairwell with the phone in my hand, not knowing quite what to do. A door slammed on the floor above me. Footsteps followed, growing louder. A couple of students passed me on their way to the first floor. I put the receiver back into the cradle, picked it up, and tried my mother again.

This time she answered the phone.

"Mom, I just spoke to Grandpa. He told me Dad's in the hospital, but he wouldn't tell me what's going on. Is he okay?"

"He had a heart attack," my mother said.

From the moment she spoke, time took on a different quality. Or maybe it was the next moment, which I don't remember, and the effect of the shock was retroactive. Either way, my mother kept talking but I didn't hear any of the words she said. As far as I could tell, there was no gap in the conversation, but part of it never existed for me.

"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 telephone in his hand. I don't know if he had just finished a call or was about to make one, but when he noticed me standing in the hallway, he returned the handset to the cradle. Neither one of us spoke. I hadn't seen Donald since Mother's Day, which we had celebrated at North Hills, my grandparents' country club on Long Island. I didn't expect tears from anybody except my grandmother, but Donald, and particularly my grandfather, seemed to be taking my dad's death in stride. "Hey, Donald."

"What's up, Honeybunch?" I sometimes wondered if either of my uncles actually knew my name.

"Dad's going to be cremated, right?" I had known for years that that was what Dad wanted. He had felt so strongly about not being buried that it was one of the first things he had told my mother after they were married. His insistence upon it bordered upon an obsession, which was why I had known about it before I turned ten.

"Right."

"And then what? He's not going to be buried, is he?"

A look of impatience crossed his face. It was clear he didn't want to be having that conversation. "I think he is." "You know that makes no sense, right?"

"That's what Dad wants." He picked up the phone. When he noticed I wasn't moving, he shrugged and started to dial.

I turned to climb the back stairway. On one end of the long second-floor hallway was Elizabeth's corner room with Maryanne's on the other side of their joint bathroom; on the other, Donald and Robert's shared bedroom was outfitted with blue-and-gold bedspreads and matching window treatments. My grandparents' much larger master bedroom stood right next to theirs and included Gam's separate dressing room with mirrored walls. In the middle of the hallway was the Cell. Dad's cot had been stripped, exposing the thin mattress. His portable radio was still on the small bedside table. The door to the closet was ajar, and I saw a couple of white button-down shirts hanging askew on wire hangers. Even on such a sunny day, the only window let in little light, and the room looked austere in the shadows. I thought I should go in, but there was nothing for me there. I went back downstairs.

The wake fell on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, but many of Dad's fraternity brothers still came. His friend Stu, who had often attended dinner parties and charity events at Jamaica Hospital with his wife, Judy, probably knew my family better than any of Dad's friends other than Billy Drake. Stu saw my grandfather standing alone in the back of the room, and he walked over to pay his respects. The two men shook hands and, after offering his condolences, Stu said, "It looks like real estate isn't doing so well. I hope Donald's okay. I see him in the news a lot, and it looks like he owes the banks a lot of money."

Fred put his arm around his dead son's friend and said with a smile, "Stuart, don't worry about Donald. He's going to be just fine." Donald wasn't there.

My brother gave the only eulogy (or, at least, the only one I remember), written on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, probably on the plane ride from Orlando, where he was a sophomore at Rollins College. He reminisced about the good times he and Dad had had together, most of which had occurred before I had been old enough to remember them, but he refused to shy away from the fundamental reality of my father's life. At one point he referred to Dad as the black sheep of the family, and there were audible gasps from the guests. I felt a thrill of recognition and a sense of vindication—at long last. My brother, who had always been so much better at negotiating the family than I was, had dared tell the truth. I admired his honesty but also felt jealous that he seemed to have so many more good memories of my father than I did.

As the wake drew to a close, I watched as people began to line up, walk past the coffin, pause with eyes closed, hands clasped—sometimes kneeling on a low cushioned bench that seemed to have been put there for the purpose —and then move on.

When my aunt Elizabeth's turn came, she began to sob uncontrollably. In the midst of all that stoicism, her display of emotion was jarring, and people looked at her with muted alarm. But no one approached her. She placed her hands on the coffin and slid to her knees. Her body was shaking so badly that she lost her balance and fell sideways to the floor. I watched her fall. She lay there as if she had no idea where she was or what she was doing and continued to cry. Donald and Robert finally came from the back of the room, where they'd been talking to my grandfather, who stayed where he was.

My uncles lifted Elizabeth from the floor. She limped between them as they pulled her from the room.

I approached the coffin eventually, tentatively. It seemed impossibly small, and I thought that there must have been a mistake. There was no way my father, at six feet two, could have fit inside that box. I ignored the bench and remained on my feet. I bowed my head, concentrating hard on one of the coffin's brass fixtures. Nothing came to me.

"Hi, Dad," I finally said under my breath. I wracked my brains as I stood there looking down, until it occurred to me that I might be standing at the wrong end of the coffin, that the conversation I was trying to have with my father was being directed at his feet. Mortified, I took a step back and returned to my friends.

There was no church ceremony. The coffin was transferred to the crematorium, and we met briefly in the chapel next door—oddly sun-drenched and bright—where a minister of no specified denomination demonstrated both his utter lack of knowledge of my father and the fact that nobody in the family had bothered to educate him about the man he was soon to consign to the flames.

When the business of the funeral was complete, the family planned to take a drive to the All Faiths Cemetery in Middle Village where the family plot was; my grandfather's parents, Friedrich and Elizabeth Trump, were the only occupants at the time. I later learned that over the preceding two days, my mother and my brother and I had separately pleaded with different members of the family to allow my father's ashes to be spread over the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

Before we left the chapel, I caught up with my grandfather to make one final plea. "Grandpa," I said, "we can't bury Dad's ashes."

"That's not your decision to make."

He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, knowing it would be my last chance. "Wasn't it his?" I asked. "He wanted to be cremated because he didn't want to be buried. Please, let us take his ashes out to Montauk."

As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I'd made a critical mistake. My grandfather realized it, too. He associated Montauk with my father's frivolous hobbies, such as boating and fishing, activities that had distracted him from the serious business of real estate.

"Montauk," he repeated, almost smiling. "That's not going to happen. Get in the car."

Sunlight glinted off the marble and granite grave markers as our grandfather, his light blue eyes squinting beneath his enormous eyebrows at the brightness of the day, explained that the tombstone, which was already inscribed with his mother's and father's names, would be removed temporarily so my father's name and dates could be added. As he spoke, he spread his hands wide, like a used-car salesman, bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost jaunty, knowing he was in the presence of a rube.

My grandfather followed the letter of the law and then did what he wanted. After my father was cremated, they put his ashes into a metal box and buried them in the ground.

Dad's death certificate, dated September 29, 1981, states that he died of natural causes. I don't know how that is possible at forty-two. There was no will. If he had anything to leave-books, photographs, his old 78s, his ROTC and National Guard medals-I don't know. My brother got Dad's Timex. I didn't get anything.

The House seemed to grow colder as I got older. The first Thanksgiving after Dad died, the House felt colder still.

After dinner, Rob walked over and put his hand on my shoulder. He pointed to my new cousin, Ivanka, asleep in her crib. "See, that's how it works." I understood the point he was trying to make, but it felt as though it was on the tip of his tongue to say, "Out with the old, in with the new." At least he had tried. Fred and Donald didn't act as if anything was different. Their son and brother was dead, but they discussed New York politics and deals and ugly women, just as they always had.

When Fritz and I were home for Christmas vacation, we met with Irwin Durben, one of my grandfather's lawyers and, after Matthew Tosti died, my mother's main contact, in order to go over the details of my father's estate. I was shocked to find out that he had one. I thought he'd died virtually penniless. But apparently there were trust funds that had been set up by my grandfather and greatgrandmother, such as the one that had paid for boarding school, that I didn't know about at the time. They were to be split between me and my brother and kept in trust until we turned thirty. The people appointed to manage those trust funds and to protect our long-term financial interests were Irwin Durben, my aunt Maryanne, and my uncles Donald and Robert. Although Irwin was the point man—it was he we had to call or meet with if we had a question or a problem or any unforeseen financial needs—Donald was the ultimate arbiter of approval and the cosigner of all checks.

Stacks of documents covered Irwin's desk. He sat in his chair behind them and began to explain what, exactly, we were about to sign. Before we got very far, Fritz interrupted him and said, "Mary and I talked about this earlier, and first we need to make sure that Mom will be taken care of."

"Of course," Irwin said. Then over the next two hours he methodically went through every piece of paper. The actual amount of money my father had left wasn't clear to me. The trusts were complex financial arrangements (at least to a sixteen-year-old), and there was what seemed to be a huge tax burden. After explaining each document's significance, Irwin pushed it across the desk for us to sign.

When he finished, he asked if we had any questions.

"No," Fritz said.

I shook my head. I hadn't understood a thing Irwin had said.