1978
We were just getting ready to leave the apartment—two of my mother’s friends from high school were visiting from out of town, and my mother had promised them a day in the city—when the phone rang.
“Fred needs to be transferred to Columbia-Presbyterian,” my grandfather told my mother. He was the only person who refused to call my father Freddy. “Can you take him?” The question, as they both knew, was rhetorical. “George will be downstairs in ten minutes.”
My mother felt put-upon, but as annoyed as she was, it didn’t occur to her either to say no or to ask her friends if they minded taking the detour. We put our coats on and went downstairs to wait for my grandfather’s limo.
Dad had returned to New York only a few days earlier. He’d been living in West Palm Beach for two years, an attempt to jump-start his life by putting some distance between him and his father. The experiment had ended when he was admitted to a Miami hospital with what the doctors eventually determined was an enlarged heart. He’d been so ill that my grandfather dispatched Maryanne, by now a prosecutor in the US Attorney’s office, to bring him back to New York, and she dropped everything to do her father’s bidding, just as my mother was doing now.
When Maryanne had arrived in Miami the previous week, Dad still had a nasogastric tube in place. He’d lost so much weight—he was down to less than 140 pounds—she almost didn’t recognize her brother at first.
She stayed at a nearby hotel until he was stable enough to travel, at which point she accompanied him on the flight north. As soon as the plane landed at JFK, she took him to the House.
When my mother and I visited him that night, he had moved back into the Cell—the small, barren bedroom in which he’d grown up. It had only been two or three months since I’d seen him in Florida, but the transformation was shocking. He was gaunt and looked not just careworn but old, although he was only thirty-nine. Even at thirteen years old, I wondered why he hadn’t been taken straight to the hospital.
That wouldn’t happen until the next day, when Dad went to Jamaica Hospital. After a workup, the doctors there determined that his enlarged heart was the result of a diseased mitral valve, which was damaged beyond repair. My grandfather, who was on the hospital’s board, had donated so much money that two years earlier the hospital had dedicated the Trump Pavilion for Nursing and Rehabilitation in honor of my grandmother.* Every courtesy was extended to him and members of his family, and the chief of cardiology called my grandfather personally to let him know that my father would need a valve transplant. At the time, replacing a human mitral valve with one from a pig was an experimental procedure, and the best place for that surgery was Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital, on the Upper, Upper West Side of Manhattan, he said. “We’ll make arrangements for your son to be transferred to the new facility.”
“I’ll take care of it,” my grandfather said. Then he called my mother.
When we pulled up in the limo to the Jamaica Hospital entrance, Dad was waiting outside despite the bitter cold of the day, as if he were determined to make things worse. His trouser cuffs bagged around his ankles and his thin coat, hanging off his shoulders, flapped around him as he approached the car. My mother, her two friends, and I took up all the seats in the back. When Dad opened the back door—George hadn’t even gotten out of the car to open it for him, as he customarily did for his passengers—he saw there wasn’t enough room for him. He slammed the door shut and stalked to the front passenger-side door without saying a word.
I’d seen Dad angry only a handful of times, usually when he was disappointed (like the time we went to the movies to see what he thought was a rerelease of Lawrence of Arabia but was, instead, The Wind and the Lion—a very different movie), or when he was worried that he might be in trouble with his father. This was different. He seethed with a rage that felt active and ready to blow but that also covered something deeper and worse—a profound sense of hurt.
From where I sat in the back seat, I could see his face, pale and miserable, in profile, his jaw clenched. A shiver passed through him, as much, I thought, from the rage as from the cold. My mother and her friends chatted as if there weren’t a cadaverous, deathly ill man—her ex-husband, the father of her children—two feet away. I did what had become habit by then: I stared out the window at the slick, grey streets and imagined I was somewhere, anywhere, else.
By the time we got to Columbia-Presbyterian nearly an hour later, Dad had fallen into a deep, exhausted sleep and could barely shake himself awake. Mom went in to the admissions desk to let them know he was there and came out with an attendant pushing a wheelchair. It took a while to rouse Dad, and he needed to be lifted into the chair. I followed him inside.
I’d seen Dad sick, jaundiced, drunk, and passed out. This was an unfamiliar kind of vulnerability, and it frightened me. After the admissions nurse checked him in, an orderly came to take him to his room. As I watched his wheelchair recede down the hall, I felt a momentary panic.
When we got back in the limo, my mother asked George if he could take us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which had been our original destination.
“Oh, no, Linda,” George said. “Mr. Trump would never allow that.” He dropped us at the nearest subway station.
It was beginning to dawn on me that nothing these people did ever made any sense, that there was something deeply out of sync about the way my family operated. I wondered why my father hadn’t had the surgery in Miami, why he hadn’t gone straight from the airport to the hospital where the surgery was going to be performed, why he hadn’t been transported in an ambulance. And, much more troubling than anything else, why hadn’t we stayed with him?