Page 144 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

they arrived at their destination, my grandfather would ask if they could go home. He wouldn’t relent until Gam gave up and they got back into the car. The idea of a weekend (or day) retreat had been for Gam’s benefit, a chance for her to get out of the House and have company. Eventually the visits became just another form of torture. Like so much else in the family that didn’t make sense, they continued doing it anyway.
Gam was in the hospital again. I don’t remember what she’d broken, but after the hospital stay, she had the option of going to a rehab facility or having a physical therapist sent to her home. She opted for the rehab facility. “Anything to avoid going back to the House,” she told me.
It was better that way. After the mugging, she had had to sleep in a hospital bed in the library for weeks. My grandfather, who’d recovered very well from his hip surgery, hadn’t had much to say in the way of commiseration or comfort.
“Everything’s great. Right, Toots?” he’d say.
In 1998, we celebrated Father’s Day at Donald’s apartment at Trump Tower for the first time. It had become too difficult for my grandfather to be in public, so our traditional trip to Peter Luger in Brooklyn was out of the question. It was a family custom to go there twice a year, on Father’s Day and my grandfather’s birthday.
Peter Luger was a deeply strange, very expensive restaurant that charged extra for bad service and accepted only cash, check, or a Peter Luger charge card (which my grandfather possessed). The menu was limited, and whether you asked for them or not, huge platters of sliced beefsteak tomatoes and white onions arrived, accompanied by tiny ceramic dishes of hash fries and creamed spinach that usually went untouched. A side of beef was brought out on trays, punctuated with little plastic cows in varying shades ranging from red (still mooing) and pink (almost able to crawl across the table) to— actually, I don’t know. All of our little cows were red and pink. Most of us ordered Cokes, which were served in six-ounce bottles; because of the legendarily bad service, that meant at the end of the evening the table was littered with the wreckage of a couple of cow carcasses, dozens of Coke bottles, and plates full of food nobody in my family ever ate.