jcohen.net

My father liked to say that dead is dead – and disliked intensely all of the euphemisms that we use to describe death. Save one: he had a fondness for a particularly evocative Victorian expression. Rather than ‘pass away’ or ‘left us’, Victorians said that a person had ‘joined the majority’. This suited my father because it was both true and literary.

I’m sure that he didn’t have much use for eulogies either. It is easy to imagine him casting a gimlet eye on this entire proceeding (though he would *really* have liked the long lines out the door here), and shaking his head with an expression of faint disgust and chagrin. He would much rather, of course, have seen another birthday.

But eulogies are for the living, and so for those of us who are still in the minority, our family has stitched together a set of stories about Edwin Cohen. Stories were his bread-and-butter: he was a consummate raconteur with a flair for the punchline and the telling detail. He powerfully remembered his own friends, and populated our imagination with tales about people long since gone: the late, great Herbert Monsky and Stan Wence among them. He relished their outsize personalities, and brought them to life for people who hadn’t know them. We have tried to do the same for him.

Many of the traits that characterized my father were present from the beginning. His childhood books attest to a twin passion for intellectual adventure and powdered sugar doughnuts; the pages of his copy of Hendrick van Loon’s The Story of Mankind tell us about a little boy who had already discovered the pleasures of snacking while reading. Chess was the field of endeavor on which the young Edwin cut his teeth: the strategy and study it required, he found, suited him. He plunged into chess with a single-mindedness that is very familiar to those of us who knew him. He started out playing with college students at Bloom’s pharmacy. Tom Duncan, his oldest friend, tells us about those days; Edwin dispatched a series of older players with uncanny ease. And then, as his brother Louis remembers, there came a call from the Truency Officer. “Mrs. Cohen,” he asked Daddy’s mother, Belle. “Do you know that Edwin hasn’t been in school for three days?” Grandma Belle made sure that he returned to school, but his chess game didn’t suffer too much for it. He played against stronger and stronger players until – at the age of 18 – he defeated the defending champion to win the Kentucky state chess tournament.

Becoming a lawyer is these days a default career for promising college graduates who don’t know quite what else to do. But my father was born a lawyer: perfectly suited by temperament and smarts for the law. He relished the adversarial system in a way that I think is probably very unusual. He was, as Uncle Louis, his life-long law partner, describes him, ‘fiercely loyal to his clients.’ Uncle Louis told me: ‘Over the years Edwin took on cases I would not have, and won them! Unfortunately he lost some he should have won, which caused him to say on occasion, ‘The courthouse is a dangerous place.’ He also liked to say: ‘You can’t be angry and smart at the same time.’

Daddy liked to say that he was fortunate in his two life-long partnerships: the first with Uncle Louis, whom Daddy always described as the ‘nicest man in the world’ and the second, with his wife – my mother, Helen. Daddy was, at the age of 36, a rather notorious man about town. He had returned from the Korean War to his parents’ house on Park Boundary Road via a successful bout of card-sharking on the troop convoy boat. He saw no particular reason to settle down; his mother’s housekeeper starched his shirts perfectly, and when he returned from a night of carousing, his mother cooked him scrambled eggs and bacon. But then he met Helen Kasdan at a wedding; each had come with dates, but by the end of the evening, he followed her out to ask for her number.

Their romance defined whirlwind courtship. On their second date, Edwin’s Corvair broke down. Helen, always very handy, fixed it; her sister had the same car, so she knew what had gone wrong with the choke. At that point, Edwin proposed, and she – amazingly enough – accepted. His father asked him: “Does she know how old you are?” Daddy said: “I don’t think so.” Papa Abe replied: “Well, don’t tell her.” Grandma Belle, for her part, was very relieved that her somewhat wild eldest son had finally made a good match. His prowling had given her a bad case of insomnia. At the wedding reception, she told my mother that she was looking forward to the first good night’s sleep she would have in twenty-five years. Later on, Daddy liked to marvel: “I really did rob the cradle, didn’t I?”

Three children followed very soon. Uncle Louis told me that he thinks that the birth of his own son, Ken, made my father see the pleasure and the fun of a child. After Sharman, my mother’s sister, had her first baby, my father called to congratulate her on getting married. Married? She’d been married for six years. “No, no,” said Edwin, “you’re not really married until you’ve had children.” He was irritated by some of the things that children entailed, especially sticky doorknobs. But he delighted in all of us for our idiosyncracies – he took pleasure in Jenny’s acumen and frugality, in Joe’s wicked wit, my cut-throat competitiveness. And, need I say it?, he was immensely generous to all of us.

What’s clearest in everyone’s mind are his enthusiasms. Edwin Cohen was a man of enthusiasms, from chess to bridge back to chess (he won his second state championship at the age of 36), from miniature roses which he ordered from a catalogue and grew under a fluorescent light in the basement, to the passions of his last twenty years: wine and food. He plunged with great excitement into new fields of endeavor, both in the law and in life. He was an avid generalist, always eager to continue learning and especially to keep reading. His erudition awed us all, just as his bookishness inspired us. Carmichael’s bookstore and Twice Told were his haunts. The university presses of America have lost their best client.

From his earliest gang – the Dirty Dozen – to the last years of his life, he knew, too, about friendship: about what it took to make and to sustain them. So many men seem not have friends: but that was not true of my father. He was a bon vivant, for whom friendship was the core. How he could laugh! I remember so vividly his laugh, as it echoed from my parents’ dinner parties to the bedrooms upstairs. One of the things that he regretted recently was that so many of his friends, like the sharp-witted Ed Begley, who cooked for him after his heart attack and persuaded him to exercise, had themselves joined the majority. But he kept on making new friends, whether at the Blue Dog Bakery or Cardiac Rehab. He reached out to people in daring ways. When he read an especially learned letter to the New York Times written by a fellow Louisvillian, he called the man to invite him to lunch. He cultivated his children’s friends. My brother Joe remembers that his friend Jenny Jenks used to confide in Daddy about her romantic dilemmas.

Until the end of his days, he retained an almost childlike glee in the world. My parents were the only people in America over the age of fifteen who pasted glow-in-the-dark stars on their bedroom ceiling because my father liked the idea of sleeping under the heavens. He was eager to try new things – at the age of nearly seventy, he and my mother ventured out to a transvestite club with Joe; now, Daddy remarked, he knew a place to go when he woke up at three o’clock in the morning. He enjoyed enormously the trips that my parents were able to take in the last five years: ventures to Pompeii and the Amalfi coast, to Paris and Venice with the Stephens, Mike and Jenny, Domenic and Joe, the Sparks and the Machins.

Edwin was, above all, optimistic. His favorite answer to the question ‘how are you doing’ was ‘swell’. He blithely disregarded the rules of the road because he felt it would all turn out fine anyway; a friend of Joe’s suggested that he apply for a license plate that read, ‘I floss’, after at least one flossing-related collision. Not everything was perfect, of course; there were things that didn’t turn out as he wanted. He wished, as he put it, that there had been clients lined up outside his office on long, hard benches waiting to see him. He probably regretted, too, that his children emulated his own delayed child-bearing habits, though he was lucky enough to know Jenny and Mike’s daughter, little Hannah, for the first two years of her life.

In an age of demonstrativeness, Daddy loved in a understated, sometimes unspoken, way. Maybe you had to look a bit harder, or listen a bit closer. Joe remembers a telling moment. He had come out at age fifteen – it is fair to say that Daddy probably hoped that he’d change his mind. And yet, when the Voice ran a picture of Joe and his boyfriend in a prom night story, Daddy went out to buy twenty copies.

And so, now Edwin Cohen has joined the majority. I don’t know if he believed in heaven – he probably didn’t. But if he did, it was a heaven that more than anything else resembled a New Yorker cartoon that he loved: a congregation of angels on fluffy clouds who remark, one to another, “Superb Martinis.”