by Paul Theroux
‘One meal overshadowed all the others,’ Millroy finally said.
‘It must have been neat.’
‘It was a nightmare,’ he said.
He made a sound in his throat that I had only heard before when he was pumping his stomach with his rubber plunger.
‘Mother’s leg,’ he said.
There was another purring, fur-covered silence.
‘It was a Sunday,’ he said, ‘and my mother was roasting a leg of lamb. After she put it into the oven she realized that she had forgotten to add bitter herbs, as mentioned in Numbers – dandelion, chicory, endive, sorrel. So, with the lamb sputtering inside the oven, she went out to buy the herbs.’
Millroy took a deep breath, he began again and gasped, he breathed once more.
‘She died on the way home,’ Millroy said. ‘Shooting pains, probably. Chest-ache. Heart burn. Shortness of breath. “I think I’ll sit down.” There was a bench at the bus stop. She sat down and died.’
‘Jeekers.’
‘That wasn’t the worst part.’
‘Jeekers.’
‘When she didn’t come back I went looking for her. I found her. I told my Aunt Sam. She arranged for the funeral.’
‘It must have been wicked sad.’
‘It got worse.’
‘Jeekers.’
‘A week after the funeral, Aunt Sam took me home and served me the leg of lamb. The same one. Mother’s leg. Aunt Sam had frozen it and saved it. “Eat it,” she said, cutting it with a dull knife, and then she stood over me.’
Millroy gulped and made several more swallowing sounds before he continued.
‘“Eat it for your mother’s sake,” she said. “She made it for you.” ’
The silence now was vast and dark and we were lost in it.
‘It had not completely thawed and so the meat was still cold and gray and corpse-like, with white strings and sinews,’ Millroy said in a muted way, as though his mouth were full. ‘You expected to find her sock on it.’
The small seizures and bursts of silence were liked muffled sobs, and I was still counting.
‘That’s how I ate mother’s leg,’ Millroy said. ‘I never ate meat after that. Would you?’
Then the darkness closed over him, and blinded and silenced and separated us again.
In the morning, Millroy said, ‘I have had a revelation,’ and seemed glad.
This was Millroy with the sun on his face (‘I work magic in daylight’), with a good idea, something visual for The Day One Program.
‘You have to help me,’ he said. ‘I can’t do it without you.’
He dressed me as a little old woman and brought me to the studio, where we rehearsed the segment – ‘Mother’s Leg.’
It was my first time at this studio, a different station from Paradise Park and a different world. People were respectful – the doorman, the security guard, the make-up woman, the technicians. Millroy had his own dressing-room.
Millroy was subdued on the set – people made room for him, they did not speak directly to him, they did not interrupt or contradict him. Millroy appeared older and more serious, with a sense of mystery about him, something dangerous perhaps, not magic but with an unpredictable power. It made me nervous, but after a while I knew why: There were no children here, no youngsters at all. Millroy was different among grown-ups. He was not himself. The real Millroy was a happier man, who sometimes had nightmares, and sometimes needed to cruise the Boston streets looking into restaurant windows, and sometimes needed me in ways I did not understand, but was always a magician.
‘I want you to think of this little old lady as my mother,’ he said to the people on the set, at the first rehearsal, beckoning me forward.
I kept my mouth shut and prayed that my wig would not fall off.
Using the simplest props, he made the story of ‘Mother’s Leg’ a silent movie, with music instead of narration. It was perfect, he said – obvious, strong, and self-explanatory.
In my apron and my wig and my mask of make-up, I was Mother Millroy, putting the leg of lamb into the roasting-pan and pushing it into the oven. Then I died. Then I was Aunt Sam, serving Millroy the leg of lamb that I had frozen – ‘Mother’s leg’ on a platter.
When Millroy refused to cut it, I took his knife and stabbed it, hacking off hunks of meat and eating them. Push the meat into your mouth with the back of your hand and chew like a cannibal.
Millroy refused to eat any of it himself. The message was: This is flesh.
Eat nothing that has a mother – nothing that has a face, Millroy said at the end of that program. Never put flesh in your mouth. Never put meat in your body.
‘Sensational program, Doctor Millroy,’ they said at the station.
Almost as soon as we got back to the diner the phones began to ring. Millroy told me to answer them and, sensing a new onslaught of interest in him, he taped next week’s show early and left on a tour of the other Day One diners. He called each night from a motel or from the diners to report that they were all enjoying an enormous success.
I was alone in the diner one night about a week after the Mother’s Leg segment and a few days after Millroy left when the telephone rang. It was late – after eleven. I thought it was Millroy, in a different time zone. Who else would call at that hour?
‘Hi,’ I said, thinking it was Millroy.
‘He is still controlling you,’ the voice said at once – no hello, no who-is-it, nothing else.
‘Who is that?’
‘Still working you like a puppet.’
It was a shaky, cranky, old woman’s voice, like that of an animal in a cartoon. I could only think of Millroy’s mother, because she had been on my mind. She was dead, but so was the voice.
‘I thought he would have left you alone by now,’ the voice said. ‘But no – he’s shameless. And he can’t disguise you.’
‘I think you have the wrong number.’
‘I have his number and no mistake.’
Where had I heard that voice? It was full of old cobwebs.
‘I am onto him.’
The voice had become very angry and witch-like and echoey. In spite of the criticisms and crazy people I had still not gotten used to strangers – or anyone – saying bad things about Millroy.
‘He’s there, isn’t he? Telling you to hang up.’
I looked at the darkness around me and tried to think whether I had locked the front door.
‘Yes.’
‘Tell him he’ll be sorry. There is nothing he can do to save himself. Tell him he’ll be destroyed. He’ll be floating belly up!’
Before I could reply, there was a click and a hum – the person hung up. I made sure the doors were locked, and I tried to sleep. I kept waking up worried, thinking: A person who calls you knows exactly where you are. I wished that Millroy were there for me to tell my worry to, the way he had been so many times with me.
‘How’s it going, bro?’ T. Van asked me the next morning.
I almost told him about the threatening phone call. But I decided not to. I was glad, though, that T. Van was so strong and that he and Troy were on duty while Millroy was away. Troy lifted weights and the Day One food had made him powerful and panther-like.
Millroy returned from his tour of the diners smiling. ‘I can’t believe the hats and shirts we’re selling.’ It doesn’t seem right – we don’t need the revenue. But if buying logo merchandise gets people eating Day One, I guess it’s a good thing. How’s everything here, buddy?’
Buddy because T. Van and Troy were listening.
Millroy was doing the accounts later that same day when he said over his shoulder, ‘I was thinking about Mister Phyllis two nights ago. I saw a re-run of the old Paradise Park on a cable station in Baltimore. I bet you don’t even remember him. Creepy old Sidney Perkus.’
The twisted old fruit. Yes: magic. Two nights ago w
as Wednesday, the night of the telephone call. His was the voice.
‘Can I tell you something?’ I said.
30
The whispers and contradictions made me feel we were in danger. Was it that now April had passed, the weather was warmer, and wearing fewer clothes I felt nakeder and vulnerable? Summer, a month away, meant that soon it would be a whole year with Millroy. What happened to that man who had put his face against mine and chose me? He was stronger, he was weaker; me too. I missed the old days when everything had been smaller and simpler – seeing Millroy sorting stones out of beans and talking about food and working magic for me in the Airstream trailer in Buzzards Bay, or Wompatuck. But what did he see in his world now?
Dressed in white – white apron, Day One baseball hat, new white shoes – Millroy looked out the front window of the diner, his hands in his pockets, watching the people crossing Park Street, making deliveries at Legal Seafoods or gathering in front of UMass or the hotel. Behind him all the new Sons and Daughters were setting up, clearing tables, and serving. We would soon be open for breakfast, and the eaters would flock to us without our doing anything except cracking open the lock. Millroy was thinking: We have not spent a penny on advertising.
‘I now realize that this is a revolutionary and reforming movement,’ Millroy said. ‘This is magic.’
The smell of baking bread was like a thick gust of scorched sweet-sour perfume, and just a whiff of it filled your head with dusty pleasure and slid down your throat and made you want to chew and swallow. ‘Yes!’ he said when I told him that a loaf of unbaked bread dough was like a baby’s bum.
‘We are moving mountains,’ Millroy said. ‘We are big. I had not foreseen how big a thing I had started and it is all Book-based and righteous. This’ – and he snorted the cooking aromas – ‘is spiritual.’
Tell him he’ll be sorry, I also heard – Mister Phyllis quacking through his thin wrinkled lips.
Meanwhile, Millroy had turned the key in the front-door lock and was shooting open the bolt. People had begun to gather, with hungry looks on their faces – the idea of feeding made them seem lost and nervous and alert, like chickens jerking their heads upright at the sound of the bolt thrown on the hen coop door.
‘I truly did not think it would be like this,’ Millroy said. ‘I had a simple idea. It worked for me. It gave me vitality. I was expressing myself for my own benefit. In all modesty, how was I to know that I possessed the universal secret to eternal life?’
And in the breakfast crowd came, looking obedient and hungry, all wearing the same facial expression, greeted by the Sons and Daughters, to be fed by Millroy.
I searched the faces of the incoming eaters for Mister Phyllis – he would be easy to identify, with his old clown’s wrinkles and sagging mouth and eyes.
Tell him he will be destroyed.
And somehow I felt that when he came to the diner he would be carrying his bad-tempered cat that Millroy had called Stinky.
The past will rise up and come through the door and amaze us, Millroy used to say.
He was talking about the Book and the crowd of hungry people, but all I could think of was Mister Phyllis.
And the truth – the truth is something we know, something we look at every day, without realizing it is the truth. The truth is obvious, he said. The truth is staring us in the face.
He meant Day One food. No church in America had made much of the food in the Book, he said. Forget the Jewish horror of pig meat. The Seventh-day Adventists based almost their whole religion on two pages of Leviticus. Jehovah’s Witnesses were fixated on the blood of strangled animals. Mormons had simply invented a cult of money and wife-collecting, and they did not drink alcohol (although nearly everyone in the Book did). The rest – beef-eating Episcopalians, spaghetti-bending Catholics, Baptist burgers – ate any old thing that fitted in their mouths.
And never trust a TV evangelist unless they can do seventy-five push-ups. If he’s unhealthy he’s a hypocrite – never mind who.
An article about Day One in The New York Times appeared under an old picture of Millroy, one of the promotional pictures sent out by Paradise Park at the time it surpassed the ratings for Sesame Street. It showed the magician smiling in his ‘Mealtime Magic’ chef’s hat, with children crowding him. The newspaper article used the phrase Gantry with granola and referred to ‘The Day One Church,’ and under the silly grinning picture the caption read, Rev. Millroy.
‘Buddy!’
And he dictated a reply to me.
With my elbows sticking out, sitting at Millroy’s pull-down desk, I wrote down what he told me, his letter to the Editor of The New York Times. He hated to be compared with Elmer Gantry. He wanted his message to be printed – he mentioned food and the Book, and living for two hundred years, and the intrusion of journalists, and what could a person do if a writer had set out to ridicule him? The letter was not published (The Editor thanks you for your communication but is unable to use it). Millroy became agitated and I went on worrying.
These misunderstandings sometimes made Millroy sulky but they suggested to me that we could be in for trouble. Already there were articles in magazines and newspapers about the great success of The Day One Program. Day One food had influenced cooking generally – so some journalists and food writers said when they called up for more information. But because Millroy refused to talk to reporters and would not be interviewed, mistakes kept cropping up. Many people just assumed that the Reverend Millroy had founded the Day One Church, and that it was as much a church as the Assembly of God or the Congregational.
Even some of the Sons and Daughters believed the mistake.
‘Far as I’m concerned, Big Guy is a preacher,’ Troy said to me quietly.
‘But he doesn’t want to be.’
‘He sure is something.’
‘A magician,’ I said. That covered everything. If someone was a magician there was nothing else you needed to know about them.
‘Where’d he go to school?’ Tomarra asked me.
‘Magicians don’t go to school.’
But I knew that was not the right answer. These questions the Sons and Daughters asked me were simple, yet the simplest were sometimes the most difficult. Was he really from El Jobean in south Florida as he had once said to me? How old was he? Did he have any real children of his own? What was the story with his magic?
‘He’s always saying how fat he used to be,’ T. Van said. ‘Well, what city was he in when he was fat?’
They asked me because they were afraid of him, and because these days he traveled more and more. They assumed that I must know the answers to these simple questions.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
Willie said in a whinnying doubting voice, ‘You sure the Big Guy is your father?’
‘Stepfather,’ I said.
Willie rolled his eyes – not for me but for the others, which made me feel all the more uncomfortable.
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ he said. ‘If you promise to do the same.’
Another time, Dedrick said to me, ‘What’s your secret, Little Guy?’
I had no answer, because Millroy had no answer for me. Was I losing him? Normally the longer you know someone the better you understand them. Time passes and makes them familiar. You are less and less afraid. Often, before they open their mouth, you know what they will say.
It was something else with Millroy. The day we met, at the Barnstable County Fair, I felt I knew him well – the way he laughed, the words he used to reassure me. He knew when I was hungry and what to feed me. He knew, before I told him, what my worries were – Gaga and Dada and school. And he calmed me, he protected me. I am safe, I said to myself. He was a friend – more than that. He was a part of me. In a previous life I had been him and he had been me, he said. I thought: maybe – in a way.
If I had not believed he was good, would I have gone off with him the
way I did? I used to repeat that answer to myself, practising for Dada or Gaga, or anyone who might ask.
But as time passed he had become more and more a man of secrets, almost a stranger. It was the reverse of everything that I had known. The longer we were together the less I knew him, the harder it was for me to predict how he would react, and I had less and less idea of how to please him. He had changed from a simple friendly soul who did tricks to a big complicated man who worked magic.
His strength made me feel weaker, and now in these months of expansion – Day One diners in three more cities – I felt powerless. I saw that all along, while admiring his magic and being dazzled by it, his magic was the very thing that prevented me from knowing him. Maybe I would never know him.
The Lord is unknowable. He dresses and talks and eats and drinks like a man, but he is God, Millroy said. You would have to be his equal to know Him – as great, as divine. And who on earth is so powerful?
That was how I felt about Millroy. And that was why the night-time phone call from Mister Phyllis had made me afraid. Millroy, once so close, now seemed large and mysterious and far-off. I liked his surprises, because he was always kind, but a person so full of surprises had to be full of secrets.
Take the Day One diners. He had not said much about them – only that he wanted to start more of them, to expand and keep growing, in order to defy the non-eaters and spread the good word. That was a fine idea, I thought – but just an idea. I did not think any more about it until one night there was an item on the radio news about Philadelphia – a boy who had killed his mother had been caught using her credit card to buy a pair of expensive sunglasses.
‘That’s a Day One city,’ Millroy said. ‘Philly.’
Meaning?
‘We’re in Philadelphia now,’ he said. ‘We’ve got a Sunday TV slot and a Day One location.’
I knew about Baltimore, Denver and some others, but Philadelphia? It was in this way that I found out about even more cities. And Millroy had plans for Tampa, Memphis, and New Orleans.