Pam Munter The Piano Player and the Singer

The Piano Player and the Singer

She wasn’t the best piano player, though at 85, she had worked at it most of her

life. Even so, she loved the music and relished playing with the boys in the band. During

the past dozen years or so, she couldn’t quite keep up reading those arrangements that

seemed to chug by way too fast. But she would pick out the appropriate chords now and

again, if inevitably coming in just a hair too early. Her fear of improvisation kept that

particular demon at bay as a viable option and she was in awe of anyone who could pull

that off. She called the performance of any musician whose playing style moved off the

page “in the ethers,” and “amazing.”

We met when I auditioned to be the singer with a big band in Palm Desert,

California. I had moved there a few years earlier from the Northwest after a hiatus from a

singing career on the road. I was eager to get back into it and knew that singing with a big

band was akin to riding the cowcatcher on a noisy, speeding freight train. It’s an

exhilarating challenge with all that syncopated power behind me.

There had been other candidates, none of them suitable. The band’s bass player

played in my Dixieland septet and asked me to audition. “They need you,” he said. The

leader left a cryptic message on my answering machine, setting the time for the audition

and told me I’d sing “a couple of tunes.”

Upon hearing that, I wasn’t surprised others had failed this vague, anxiety-provoking

pressure test. To allay my concern and satisfy my usually compulsive preparation, I took

advantage of my bass-playing friend’s insider status to find out the likely songs and the

keys. Then I got the phone number for the big band’s piano player and asked her to meet

with me beforehand to rehearse. She was the only female musician in the band. I was

hoping for kinship and support in this.

Irene lived in a triple-wide manufactured home in a gated senior development. As

soon as she opened the door, her diminutive body seemed to vibrate with tension. Yet she

was welcoming as she led me through her fussy, teddy-bear-littered living room into the

stuffy music room. She pulled out a vocal chart she thought likely to be called and started

the intro to the uptempo Gershwin standard, “’S Wonderful.” Fortunately, it was in my key

and I had sung it many times before. When I finished, she said, “Oh, you’ll get the job.

They’d be very lucky to have you.” We went over a few more possible charts and she

declared I was “in the ethers.” The next afternoon, I killed the audition, joined the band,

and we became instant friends.

Perhaps it’s more accurate to say we became email buddies. Irene spent many hours

a day exchanging messages with her friends and I became one of them. In addition to band

events, we met now and again for a celebratory meal or a quick visit but we did best at a

distance.

As the emails progressed, she gradually—and I sensed reluctantly—revealed herself,

perhaps in ways she had not done with many. After a few years, she confided that 12 years

earlier, she had been diagnosed with stage four metastatic carcinoma and hadn’t been

expected to live. No one we both knew had any knowledge of this, and she asked me more

than once to keep it between us. She proudly described herself as being made of

“concrete and nails,” but that wasn’t my impression at all. She seemed a tightly wrapped

bundle of nerves, barely glued in place, closed off to any possibilities but polite palaver.

She never opened her front door unless she was fully made up—always with her habitual

bright blue eye shadow and heavy Giorgio cologne. Her outfit was completed with big,

clunky earrings.

After her abusive, alcoholic husband died a year or so into our relationship, she

seemed to become more joyful even while increasing her airtight denial. She started telling

me funny stories about how she had taunted her husband, who was often in an alcoholic

stupor. He would drink while sitting on a bar stool in their kitchen which overlooked the

piano room. His unwavering glare annoyed and unnerved her as she practiced, so she

bought a portable folding screen and erected it between the piano and his line of sight. We

both laughed at its visual impact and message. Dealing with conflict indirectly was her

preferred m.o.

Living constantly under the threat of a recurrence of her disease, she was

protective, not only about disseminating information to others but about merely hearing

other people’s medical traumas. She did not allow anyone to voice physical complaints

around her. Negative thoughts and words were anathemas, feared as potentially powerful

emotional antecedents to bad medical news down the line. To her, words could be

causative. She would flippantly describe her own feelings using song titles or hyperbole,

lacking both authenticity and genuine disclosure. “I’m just ‘Breezin’ Along With The

Breeze’ today,” she would say on a good day. It was as though she couldn’t find words to

describe her inner state. Cliches were so much safer. It kept real life and her own fears at

bay. If she had a medical appointment, she would write, “I’m sure everything will be

perfect.” She added a benediction. “May nothing happen to the contrary. Then I can come

home to ‘Something Cool.’”

She often emailed about wanting change—in her yard, her furniture, her friends or

her doctors—but nothing ever came of it. Easily overwhelmed by the steps involved and the

fear of making a mistake, she comfortably left things as they were. She preferred her own

discomfort to the possibility of conflict.

We were of different generations and backgrounds, revealing occasionally jarring

contrasts. If either of us mentioned a project that needed doing, she would quickly quote

the song title, “It’s So Nice To Have A Man Around The House,” a direct and ironic

contradiction to her long and hellish life with her dead husband and to my well-known

feminist views. Her best friend was a married man in her complex who would visit each

week, performing minor handyman tasks while bringing her food and good cheer. But she

was hungrier still for what she called acknowledgement, as if she didn’t really exist unless

someone else infused her psychological fragility with praise. As a result, she maintained

several lengthy relationships with unkind people who would compliment her just often

enough. The dependence on clichés and the brittle Pollyanna demeanor were easy to

sidestep in email, but not so much in person. When we’d meet, she would enthusiastically

repeat favorite stories, mostly about musicians and singers we both knew, dominating the

conversation with chirpy monologues about them. “Ted is just such a fine musician. You

know he was with Benny Goodman’s band in the 40s. He has a lifetime contract at Willard’s

club now. And he’s 93.” She loved to reminisce and romanticize her past, spinning familiar

stories about life as a “working girl in a man’s world.” She told me about her boss “chasing

me around the desk. He was so handsome but I never let him catch me. By then I was in

love with Rodney. Boy, was I stupid or what? ‘Stupid Cupid!’” As a rule, she sought out

others who spilled out long-ago third-person tales, too, never seeking a genuine encounter.

Neither truth nor accuracy was important here, and certainly not interactive conversations.

She wanted to be entertained and distracted, if only by herself.

Once I had somehow earned her trust, she told me her truths more often, always in

email. If she wasn’t feeling well or having problems with family members, she shared some

of the details, which I understood to be rare disclosures in her world. She knew she would

get an honest and nonjudgmental response. Reciprocally, I found myself telling her things I

had not shared with other friends. We had become a reassuring part of each other’s daily

infrastructure, exchanging several emails a day.

On occasion, when her frequent emails dwindled, I knew something was wrong. She

often struggled with her computer, dependent on her nephew who lived out of state to

unlock its mysteries and to repair what inadvertent damage she might have done with a

misplaced keystroke. Technology was not her friend. For her birthday one year, I bought

her Macs for Dummies, which she kept on her desk for reference. Each time there was a

time lapse, I patiently waited until she resolved the silence.

I began to think about her death. She lived alone, so how would I know? Would it be

the sudden disappearance of her emails? A telephone call from the nephew? I thought

about how much I would miss those frequent emails, always full of chatter and trivial news,

the kind of interaction I could never pull off for long in person. In spite of myself, she had

become an affirmative force in my life and, as I considered it, sometimes the only one

during the years we had known one another.

Inevitably over time, Irene began to experience age-related physical problems she

would not discuss in detail, so characteristic of her. Apparently, a gardener had found her

lying on the patio and called 911. Her family, who lived 75 miles away, helped her move

out of her beloved triple-wide Eden, first into a nursing facility, than into a care home

close to them. Other than the times she was very ill, she kept up our daily email

correspondence, now all in capital letters. She apologized because they weren’t longer,

lamenting her lack of energy to be upright too long. I could sense she knew her life was

winding down. She expressed little regret about putting down the beloved cat she had

adopted a few years earlier, as if she were clearing out anything that might cause others

any inconvenience.

One morning following another medical crisis, she emailed that she had opted for

palliative care. She was enjoying sleeping a lot, she said, seldom hungry, feeling no pain.

Her family had bought her a comfortable recliner for her room, but she still struggled to

slowly edge to the table to answer any emails that might be awaiting her. Though she was

surrounded now by family and caregivers, she would not give up on her friends in

cyberspace. The weeks passed and I waited.

Her daughter-in-law emailed me to say she was sleeping nearly all the time now and

that she was now reading my emails to Irene aloud every day. She encouraged me to keep

writing them, as Irene seemed to perk up when they came. With careful thought, I wrote

about what I was enjoying, what I was planning to do, trips I might take—all consistent with

the upbeat personality I had come to know. I knew continuing our connection even in this

odd manner was her way of saying, “Goodbye.” Mine, too.

Her memorial was held at the clubhouse in the complex where she had lived for

years. The room was full of friends, old and new, who reminisced about her piano playing,

her unflinching support of other musicians, her loyalty no matter what. Her nephew, a

professional piano player of whom she was very proud, entertained in the background with

Great American songbook tunes while we all shared a buffet lunch.

A niece recalled with glee that Irene loved Halloween so much that she seldom

waited for that holiday in order to dress up as a witch. In fact, I had seen her in her full

regalia at a dinner party at my house. Fortunately, she had warned me beforehand. She

entered with a flourish of her cape and a wicked cackle, removing the costume only when

dinner was served. It had become her calling card.

Still, it was a bit jolting when the event full of warm reminiscences came to a close

with her nephew playing—and animatedly singing—“Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead” from

“The Wizard of Oz.” We all laughed through our tears. It was just the kind of send-off she

would have loved.

Pam Munter

Pam Munter is a former clinical psychologist, performer and film historian. She has authored several books, including When Teens Were Keen: Freddie Stewart and The Teen Agers of Monogram (nonfiction), and, most recently, Fading Fame: Women of a Certain Age in Hollywood (fiction). She has also written essays, book reviews, short stories, and plays. Pam has an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts, her sixth college degree.