Train Go Sorry

by Leah Hager Cohen

  I knelt and pulled out the drawer directly in front of me, stuck my fingers a third of the way in, and parted a couple of thick brown folders. I had landed in a batch of Cohens. “Dad . . .” I picked through them gingerly; even so, flakes of discolored paper fluttered to the bottom of the drawer. “Dad, I think . . .” I passed Charlotte and Joseph, Lester and Millie, Rachel and Ray and Rebecca, and there, quite complaisantly, followed Samuel. “Dad.”

  I held the folder out to him. Somewhat to my chagrin, he did not say, “Go ahead, look,” but accepted it from me. I stood on tiptoes behind his shoulder.

  The first thing inside was a note, typed on a relatively fresh white index card. “This is it,” my father murmured, reading the card. “This is Grandpa’s.” The note read:

  1/12/79

  This new file was made up since

  Mr. Samuel Cohen’s original file was

  destroyed in a fire that occurred in

  the old school at Lexington Ave. &

  68th St., Manhattan.

  Paperclipped to the note was a long brown envelope. My father shook out its contents: one wallet-size photograph of a boy in late adolescence. “This is it,” my father repeated. The boy wore a heavy dark sweater over a white shirt, the left shoulder of which bulged messily against his collar. His hands were clasped just below the chest, and his chin and neck were thrust forward so that his Adam’s apple protruded above the knot of his tie. His hair was slicked back in a glossy wave. His lips were just parting. The pockets of skin below his eyes were gathered in mirth; he looked slightly up, as though he were gazing at the photographer rather than the lens.

  I knew about the fire that destroyed the original file; my father had warned me not to expect much of this reconstructed one, if we even located it. But the folder was gratifyingly thick. We took it upstairs to examine in better light.

  On the way to my father’s office, we met a maintenance worker wheeling a garbage can down the hall.

  “Do you still need that light, Dr. Cohen?” he asked.

  “No. No thanks, Fernando. We got it.” My father held up the brown folder, showing what the “it” was, then, almost shyly, extended it. “This is the file of someone who was a student at Lexington in 1916,” he explained as Fernando gently, quizzically opened the cover. “The student’s name was Sam Cohen,” he went on, pausing to let the connection take hold. “My father.”

  “Your father was a student at this school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then he don’t hear?”

  “No, he was deaf.”

  Fernando and my father beheld each other for a moment and smiled. Then Fernando handed back the folder. “Okay, see you later,” he said, and went on dragging the big garbage can on wheels down the hall.

  On the wall behind my father’s desk hangs an old photograph, creased and cracked and now pressed under glass. In the photograph, eleven men kneel or stand in the dark athletic uniforms of the Hebrew Association of the Deaf, their hands clasped behind their backs, chins tucked in, chests out. On the floor in the center rests a basketball on which is inscribed “1937-1938 Champions.” The young man standing second from the right, trying to look serious, is Sam Cohen.

  When visitors come to my father’s office for the first time, he will invariably point out the photograph. Often he will invite people to step behind his desk for a close look at the faces. Sometimes he will ask them to guess which man is his father. I have seen him display the picture to a deaf leader visiting from Moscow, a couple of black women pilots giving a presentation for Black History Month, the ambassador from Grenada, the deaf president of Gallaudet University, and a frightened high school student who was sent to his office for in-school suspension. He uses this photograph like a passport. With hearing people, it becomes a point of reference. With deaf people, it is a port of entry, proof of affiliate membership.

  It was back to this office that we brought Sam Cohen’s file, and it was here, thanks to the fact that my father’s calendar was crammed with prior commitments, that I had the opportunity to peruse its contents alone. I read slowly, handling each spotty, crumbling document with care. They rustled and whispered as I turned them over, laid them softly down: the crackling onionskin, the mossy carbon copies, the yellowed memos scrawled with a fountain pen, their old-fashioned flourishes and curlicues gone a parched brown.

  In 1916, Lexington was known as the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes, or, more familiarly, as the Deaf-and-Dumb Institution. Those words appear on nearly every page in the folder, weighing heavily, like lead sinkers lashed again and again to his name: Deaf-Mute Sam, Deaf-and-Dumb Sam, making him the responsibility of the authorities, turning him over to the institution. One set of papers makes him a state pupil, “to be educated and supported . . . at the expense of the county of Kings.” Several other papers, signed by Sam’s father (also named Oscar), authorize the institution doctors to examine the child, remove his adenoids and his tonsils, inoculate him, give him glasses. Most of these permissions consist simply of a signature, but the one that includes a brief note may well reveal the core of my great-grandparents’ attitudes toward the role of the authorities regarding their deaf son. In hasty, looping script, my great-grandfather wrote, “I am satisfied that you are going to do the right thing for him. and oblige yours truly Oscar Cohen.” The grim lead weights, son and all, dropped neatly out of sight.

  In 1928, after twelve years of school, Sam graduated and moved back home to Brooklyn. Within months his father was appealing to Lexington for help, writing, “Sam tried very hard to find work, but it was impossible. He had no trade as your school did not teach him a trade. We do not know what to do. We are all upset. He is a boy of twenty-one years old and is nearly a man and has to earn a living.”

  Mr. Harris Taylor, the principal of the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf-Mutes, responded defensively that although everyone at the school was extremely fond of Sam, “he was one of those boys who wasted an enormous amount of time,” and “we have never been able to make a worker of him, and unless he learns to work harder he will have trouble.” He cited specifically Sam’s poor speech and language skills, as well as his slovenly work in the sign-painting and printing departments. Then, with mighty benevolence, Mr. Taylor wrote that the twenty-one-year-old Sam was “a good boy,” and assured my great-grandparents that “in any failure or in any trouble that may arise, you may count upon our sympathy, because everyone is a friend to Sam.”

  Indeed, the same day he wrote that letter, the principal advised Sam, via Western Union, “May have job for you. Come here tomorrow morning at eleven.” Further correspondence in the file testifies to the school’s continued attempts to help Sam find a job, as well as to the apparent lack of success of these efforts. The following February, my greatgrandfather again wrote to the principal on his son’s behalf: “During the time he has been out of school (he has been out a year now) he has only worked for two months at sign-painting for $12.00 a week. Then he was layed [sic] off. Since then he has gone out to look for work every day and can’t seem to find any because of his being handicapped, it seems. Perhaps it is in the power of your Institution to help Sam find work? If so will you please let me know?”

  I picture my great-grandfather as a sturdy man bundled in a thick overcoat and fur hat, plodding through snow to post the letter, his great bushy eyebrows bunched with worry. And I picture the principal as a clean-shaven man in a brown suit, a goodhearted man who had abandoned other, more comfortable careers to help deaf-mutes improve their unfortunate lot; I picture him reading the letter at his desk, perhaps rubbing a hand across his smooth jaw, sighing.

  But in all the letters, the telegrams, the documents, the medical records, I couldn’t locate Sam himself. I didn’t know how to picture my grandfather in any of this, until one day when my Uncle Max was visiting. I had taken the bulky brown folder home to study more carefully, and Max sat at the kitchen table, jiggling his knee and leafing through it. He came
to his grandfather’s letter, read it, and snorted.

  “Pop went out to look for work every day, my ass,” barked Max, tugging at the corner of his blond mustache. The skin under his eyes creased faintly in a private grin. “He was out playing ball.”

  The final picture slid into place. Now I could complete the image: my great-grandfather dropping his letter anxiously into the box; Mr. Harris Taylor shaking his head behind a big polished desk; and my grandfather, Sam, on the court, away from language lessons and hearing employers and jobs where he couldn’t talk with anyone, just Sam on the court, flying up and down the asphalt, his heart and lungs and limbs all engaged in what they did best.

  The spring Sam turned seventy, we sent out dozens and dozens of birthday party invitations, hand-lettered by my mother and watercolored by me. We cleaned our whole house—the dust mice under the armchair, the peanut shells in the hearth, the dog-nose smudges on the windowpanes over the couch. We bought two six-foot submarine sandwiches, at which Reba, Andy, and I marveled; still in their amber cellophane wrappers, they spread importantly down the entire length of the dining room table. And all along the one-mile route from the Tappan Zee Bridge to our house, we thumbtacked markers to telephone posts, colored balloons with signs reading SAM.

  It was not our family’s custom to throw large birthday parties, even for septuagenarians, but something greater was being celebrated this year. My grandfather had finally been elected into the Hall of Fame of the New York State Athletic Association for the Deaf. This was his life’s dream, the one he had given up hoping for nearly two decades earlier.

  Shortly after his marriage, Sam had landed a job cutting terry cloth for women’s bathrobes. This remained his occupation throughout his life. A member of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, he provided the sole income for his family—his wife, Fannie, and their two hearing sons. Each morning he rode the elevated train along Jerome Avenue to work; he punched a clock and cut cloth all day with heavy shears; at night he returned home so tired that he was notorious for sleeping past his stop on the train. It was a fine job for a deaf man in the middle of the twentieth century, and with these hours of his life he provided sustenance for his family.

  But Sam lived for his moments on the court. He had always loved basketball. In grammar school, he played it alone in the rain and snow during lunch recess and after school in the Lexington courtyard. At home during the summers, when his parents -imposed limits on his playing, he would toss his sneakers and shorts from the window of their sixth-floor apartment and tell his mother he was going out to buy a newspaper, then return hours later, most often without the paper.

  As an adult his life continued to revolve around basketball, and around the Union League, one of the oldest deaf clubs in the country. Every Thursday night my grandfather would go to the Ansonia Hotel in Manhattan, where the club members met to play cards and talk. He attended so devoutly that on Knox Place, Thursday was fingerspelled U-L; my father likes to say that he grew up believing the days of the week were Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, UL, Friday, and Saturday.

  Sam played basketball for the Union League, the Lexington Boys, the Hebrew Association of the Deaf, the Pelicans, and other deaf teams. He was the only deaf player on two semiprofessional teams, the Philadelphia Spas and the Castle Hill Beach Club. He coached and played basketball until 1959. When he stopped, my father, just out of high school, wrote a letter to the American Athletic Association of the Deaf (AAAD), the first of many letters he would write on his father’s behalf. It explained that Sam, then fifty-two years old, had developed cataracts and was awaiting an operation; moreover, the factory where he had been employed for twenty-five years had shut down, so he was out of work as well. “For the eighteen years of my life,” my father wrote,

  I have regarded my father as a happy, jovial person who seems to enjoy life more than any person possibly could. During these past five weeks I have seen him turn into a depressed, despondent individual. On the outside he still acts the same but on the inside there has been a change that only one as close to him as myself could notice.

  Just yesterday while looking through some papers I found the letter that you sent to him in 1956 concerning his nomination to the AAAD Hall of Fame. Knowing my Father as I do I realized that he most likely forgot all about answering your letter, as his main interest is participating in sports events and not the publicity or notoriety involved.

  So now I can tell you the purpose of this letter. I thought of any possibility that might have a chance of cheering him up a little and I thought that if there was a chance of him making the Hall of Fame this would be a terrific lift. I am not asking for any charity nor do I want you to feel sorry for my Father for he is not a man to feel sorry for but a man to envy because of his great talents. I know how good an athlete he was and still is because he taught me everything I know about basketball and I have a few trophies to show for the learning he has given me. I would like to say again that my Father does not know anything about this letter, if he did he would probably beat the daylights out of me because of the tremendous amount of pride instilled in him.

  My father signed his name in neat black script, sealed and stamped the envelope, and then I imagine him tramping through the snow to the mailbox, following the ghost-prints of his dead grandfather. The letter went unanswered, yielding no results, and Sam never knew what his son had done. It was eighteen years before Sam’s nomination resurfaced and he was finally inducted into the Hall of Fame. He received news of the honor just four months shy of his seventieth birthday.

  The day of the party, my grandfather appeared mildly bewildered when he first emerged from one of the rear doors of the car that friends had driven up from the Bronx. All of his friends and relatives clustered expectantly in our yard, holding hunks of submarine sandwich and beer and cake, grinning at him while he blinked uncertainly back. (Later we learned that my grandmother, in a cunning effort to prevent him from seeing the posters along the roadside, had snatched his glasses from his face as soon as the car left the exit ramp, on the pretext that they were shamefully filthy, and proceeded to scrub them vigorously with her skirt for the next mile, effectively keeping the party a surprise.) When my grandfather was finally apprised of the occasion for this gathering, his thin, wide mouth opened in unabashed appreciation, and he went around most of the afternoon beaming, his eyes glittering behind clean, clean lenses.

  Late in the afternoon someone bounced a basketball out of the toy box in our garage. We didn’t have a hoop, but one was mounted on the Rotellis’ garage, next door, so we all gathered at the edge of their driveway and my grandfather took the ball out to what seemed like half-court. I had no faith at all that he would make it—him at seventy years old, with hair as white as birchbark and teeth that came out at night—and it made me queasy to think of him missing, today of all days. We watched in silence as he gently coiled his frame, his hands a smooth socket for the ball, then sprang his body open and let the sphere arc above us. It sank through the net, steady and definite. In this arena he never missed.

  Three years later, in July, we held his funeral gathering at Max’s house in Brewster. People drove up from Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens and walked through the house depositing armloads of food, pot roast and kugels and soups and challah and pickles and olives and pastries and fruit baskets and nuts and chocolates, and then they continued out to the back lawn, where the acre of neatly trimmed grass rolled to the edge of the woods. The grownups reclined in plastic chairs and metal chaises, the women plucking damply at the necks of their dark blouses. We children kicked off our good, uncomfortable shoes and stepped barefoot over bees in the clover. We got sick on too much fruit and chocolate and sat in the grass, eavesdropping on the hearing people and watching the deaf people sign to one another; all of it seemed equally incomprehensible.

  After a while I retreated into the cool, wood-smelling shade of the living room and stood looking through the square panes of the sliding doors. Uncle Max had
wept at the service, but my father had not cried at all. I saw him now through the polished glass, moving about on the lawn, his shoulders rounded beneath his white shirt, a forgotten drink suspended perilously from his fingers. He nodded while someone signed to him. I had not been able to speak to him all day; I felt a little bit afraid of him, his iron sadness, his awful grace.

  Some hearing children of deaf parents say that they had to assume parental roles when they were young, that they had to function as interpreters, caregivers, providers, instructors. They talk about growing up under the crushing weight of these responsibilities.

  My father has never had much use for essays and articles expounding on this subject. He is quick to point out that he never supported the family, he didn’t buy the groceries, he didn’t feed the family or take care of the apartment—that it was his parents who tended him, who nurtured him emotionally, who were the rock.

  Watching him on the lawn that day, his broad shoulders so bent, his muscles gripping in a kind of mineral stillness, I both craved and dreaded to witness some slippage, some chipping or crumbling. It would be ten years before this happened, before I heard my father’s voice thicken and break, before I heard the full story of my grandfather’s death.

  On Saturday afternoon, July 25, 1981, Sam and Fannie had been heading to the Union League when Sam, walking a few steps behind Fannie, collapsed. Someone touched Fannie’s arm; she turned and saw a crowd gathered around her husband. He lay crumpled on the bright sidewalk; blood came from his head. Police came, then an ambulance. He was taken to the Cabrini Medical Center on East Nineteenth Street and admitted to the Cardiac Care Unit.

  When my father arrived at the hospital that afternoon, he explained to the CCU staff, nurses, and physicians that Sam was profoundly deaf and could not speak intelligibly. He emphasized the importance of having someone who was able to communicate in American Sign Language so that Sam could know what was happening to him and so the hospital staff could obtain information about symptoms and medical history and responses to their questions. My father said that he would serve as an interpreter. He gave the hospital his telephone numbers at home and at work. He said he would come to the hospital immediately whenever he was called.