The woman with silver hair set the old snare drum on a stand at the front of the funeral home, and for a moment she just looked at it, with one hand resting on the rim. The drumhead was yellow with age and covered edge to edge in signatures, hundreds of them, in ink and pencil and marker, crowded and overlapping. She was in her sixties, tall and slender, in a black silk blouse and a silver bracelet, with the straight back of a dancer. She picked up the brushes. “My name is Marguerite Dunn,” she said. “I am a jazz drummer. And your father taught me everything I know.”
A ripple went through the room. I was in the second row, forty four years old, beside my mother and my uncle, who had spent the morning telling the funeral director to keep the music to a minimum. My father had been a casino lounge drummer for forty years, in a bowtie, in the dark corner of a room that smelled of smoke and spilled drinks. My uncle had always called it banging on pots for drunks. “In 1976 I was thirteen,” said Marguerite. “I snuck into the Starlite Lounge on a school night. I stood in the doorway and I watched a man play.”
“Girls did not play drums. Everybody told me so. My teacher told me, my father told me, the boys in the band told me. But this man saw me at the door, and at the end of the set he waved me over. He said, Little lady, what do you want? I said, I want to do that. He handed me a pair of brushes. He said, Come back tomorrow at four, before the doors open. And I did. Every afternoon for six years.”
An old snare drum covered in signatures was set up by a silver haired woman who then picked up the brushes and gave one son the afternoon to bring his uncle back to the bandstand.
“He never charged me a dime. He taught me time. He taught me to listen. He used to say, The job of a drummer is to make everybody else sound good. He said the best drummer in the room is the one nobody notices, because the whole band is breathing together.” She touched the head of the drum. “When I was nineteen, I left for New York. He gave me this snare. He said, Everybody who ever played with me signed it. Take it. Get everybody who ever plays with you to sign it too. And one day, bring it home.”
I looked at the drum, at the names. Some I recognized. A famous singer. Two trumpet players from the old Vegas days. A comedian who had been on television. And hundreds of others, in sprawling hands, with dates and cities, from every decade of the life of my father. I had never seen it. It had been in his closet for forty four years. My uncle, beside me, was staring at it with his jaw slack. All week he had said my father threw away his life on a bandstand.
Marguerite lifted the brushes. “Let me play for him,” she said. She closed her eyes, and she began to brush the snare head in a slow circle, a soft sound like rain on a tin roof. The sound grew. A pulse rose out of it, a swing, a lilting walking beat that made the whole room sway in their seats. She played for four minutes. It was not loud. It was the sort of playing that gets inside a person and rearranges the furniture. Somewhere in the second minute I realized that I was crying, and that so was every other person in the room.
When the last note faded, nobody clapped. Then, from the back of the room, a trumpet began. A man in a gray coat, in his seventies, had taken a horn out of a case. A bass player stood. A pianist walked to the old upright in the corner. It was the band. Not a band, the band, the very men who had stood on the Starlite stage, night after night, behind my father. They had come without being asked. They played together for an hour, an old standard, then another, and the room filled with a music I had not known my father made.
My uncle was weeping openly. He is a heavy, proud man who sells insurance, and he sat with his face in his hands. When the music finished, he rose and walked to the snare, and he put one finger on a name in the corner, a name in blue ink, dated 1981. “That is my signature,” he said, in a broken voice. “I came to see him in 1981. I asked him to play at my wedding. He played for three hours, for free, and I signed his drum, and then I forgot.” He wiped his face. “I called it banging on pots. Forgive me, brother.”
Marguerite announced one more thing. The city of Reno, in a ceremony she had been invited to the month before, was going to name the stage of the new downtown music hall for my father. His drum would be displayed under glass. “But I have a request,” she said, turning to me. “The drum should be played. A drum under glass is a dead drum.” She held out the brushes. “Danny, your father said you had good hands. He said you stopped playing at fourteen because you were embarrassed.” I felt my face go hot. She did not look away.
So I took the brushes. My hands shook the first night. I played a slow circle on the old yellow head, among the signatures, with the band behind me, in a dim room that smelled of old wood, and the sound that came out was small and ragged and true. At the end I looked up at the empty chair in the first row, where someone had left a bowtie. I did not need to ask whose. I played another circle, softer, and then I added my own name to the drum, in the very last blank corner, next to his.
