by Paul Theroux
Scooping flour into a bucket for the overnight bread, I worked in a single shaft of light that came through the hatchway opening. I had my usual naked fearful deep-hole feeling that something heavy and hard was going to drop onto my head – clunk on me through the trap-door opening.
I lost count of the scoopfuls out of nervousness, took a guess scooped some more and kept glancing up.
But I was not looking up when it appeared. I heard it instead – a spitting hiss and gargling harshness that started as a howl and ended as shriek, with a tingling echo in the cellar where I stood, the light making my face feel like a target. The sound was like stinking wind. Then I saw it.
A fat-faced cat with its mouth open was gasping and peering across the black edge of the hole, right over my head as though it wanted to pounce onto my head and claw my scalp off like peeling a fruit.
As I watched, a shaking shriveled hand with yellow fingernails reached around and closed over the cat’s mouth.
‘Tinky,’ a voice said, quavering like Gaga’s just before she would turn nasty.
A granny’s face that went with the voice looked over the edge of the hole. It was an old man, but the face was as puffy and womanish as the cat’s face with its folds of saggy fur and crusted eyes.
‘Tinky found a wee mouse.’
So sudden, such a fright, with a creepy sound – a hiss, a gasp, half human, half cat, and both the cat and the man sounded like an old woman choking. It all happened fast and because of the speed of one awful thing after another I was more afraid of the cat than the man.
But it was not a man – it was Mister Phyllis, with his wrinkled lips and wicked eyes and sparse orangey hair and thin blotchy skin. When I saw the rest of him he looked like a decaying clown.
He clutched the big cat like a fur bag, holding it plumply on his arm. Now the cat seemed normal and it made Mister Phyllis seem dangerous.
‘Where is he?’
Now he was angry, Mister Phyllis’s nose tightened and turned white – I could see the gristle through the skin.
‘Millroy!’ he called out.
I stood trembling at the foot of the steep ladder, feeling trapped.
‘Get up here,’ Mister Phyllis said.
Leaving my flour basket behind, I climbed the ladder and when I got to the top and stuck my head above the hatchway I saw that the diner was empty. Those last eaters must have finished and bussed their own tables, the way our eaters did, while I was down below.
Mister Phyllis was shorter than when I had last seen him – had I grown that much? – and although he had a nasty face and yellow eyes, he seemed fragile – not sick, but breakable.
‘Where is Millroy?’
I was also thinking how much smaller than Millroy this man was.
‘He’s not here,’ I said, and felt unsafe.
If I had known how to work Millroy’s magic I would have tried to shock this man somehow – make him whimper and cringe, the way Millroy had. Now more than ever I admired Millroy’s power to frighten a bully with his own furious rats.
‘He won’t be back until Friday,’ I said. I was sorry as soon as the words were out of my mouth.
‘So you’re alone, chicken.’ Mister Phyllis spoke my own fearful thought.
I began to back up, to be out of his reach and away from his odor of decay and soap-slime, and it made me feel pukey, like the smell of industrial deodorant in a public toilet.
‘Your customers all went home,’ he said. ‘So it’s just the four of us.’
The four of us?
I turned and saw that what I had taken to be a big shadowy chair at the far end of the diner was a person – a woman, staring intently at me. She was motionless and what was most distinct about her was her hair, the wisps of white, and her big knees.
‘I brought someone I wanted your Millroy to meet,’ Mister Phyllis said.
He laughed in the way his cat gasped.
‘But you’ll do, chicken.’
And hearing that, the woman hitched forward so that her head was in the light and a stripe of shadow was bent across her body like a chevron. She was very old, she was silent, she was not one of us. She was wide and pale and wobbled when she moved her shoulders, with fat legs and a peeved Smoker’s Face. She sat in a lopsided way with the shadow marking her, one chubby hand clutching the other. I had never seen anyone her size or shape in the diner, though we saw them all the time in the Boston streets.
She made me afraid, as Mister Phyllis and his cat did, though for a different reason. Misshapen Americans made me think of insanity and death.
‘I fancy she wants to talk to you,’ Mister Phyllis said.
‘Does she know me?’
The big top-heavy woman moved as I spoke, and hearing a creaky noise I imagined the sound coming from her body, because I could not tell where her body ended and the chair began.
‘She knows as much as I do,’ Mister Phyllis said, ‘since I told her everything I know. About him. About you. About the TV program.’
He began to suck air through the dark spaces between his teeth very hard with a sudden luscious sound.
‘I started in radio years ago, a kids’ show called Checkerboard. We showcased Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. We had all the top sponsors – Spam, Stern’s Meat Patties, Hecker’s Spreadables’ – he looked around the diner as he spoke these food names. ‘I’ve had a massively long career. I was very big. And your Millroy destroyed me.’
It had been less than a year since the end of Paradise Park. How was it that Mister Phyllis now seemed so much smaller than me? I was a whole head higher – he hardly came to my shoulder. That gave me the courage to face him, and when I did he moved sideways, propping his cat up, boosting the floppy creature onto his shoulder and looking annoyed.
‘All Millroy did was open your mike. You destroyed yourself.’
‘He tricked me.’
‘You hated the children. You even said so.’
‘Liar – your pants are on fire.’
‘You made threats at us.’
‘It was supposed to be a joke.’
‘We were afraid,’ I said.
‘Then you’re all fraidy cats.’
‘You wouldn’t let children be on your program and you used wicked bad language.’
The cat was hissing harshly on Mister Phyllis’s shoulder.
‘Millroy ruined me. I have not worked since.’
He spoke this and the rest of it in the same breathless way that his cat was now hissing, both the man and the cat gasping and sucking air.
‘You’re sticking up for him,’ Mister Phyllis said. ‘He’s using you. You’re a fool and you don’t even know it.’
I did not reply. Maybe I was a fool. But Millroy was not one.
‘You’re a silly clucking chicken,’ Mister Phyllis said.
The cat had begun to gargle, all its sounds like bad pipes or an old toilet, and I backed away when that word came to me.
‘But now you’re all alone.’
I did not know what to say. I could defend Millroy when he was attacked – Millroy was a magician, Millroy had supported us and saved us all. But I could not defend myself. When I was criticized I always thought, They’re probably right.
‘You’re all going to be sorry.’
He took a step towards me, clawing the air with the yellow nails of one wrinkled hand, and his cat yowled. As I whimpered out loud there was a clatter from the far end of the room. The woman I had seen earlier now stood up unsteadily and kicked her chair aside.
‘That’s enough of that,’ the old woman said, her voice rumbling, as she hurried towards Mister Phyllis. ‘Get away.’
Smoker’s Voice made her sound tough. Mister Phyllis winced as she raised her hand, and the cat screeched again.
‘Leave off,’ Mister Phyllis protested, and made a horrible face, as though to frighten the woman.
‘This little bloke Alex was sticking up for him,’ Mister Phyllis said in a whining voice.
‘I am, flat-out, not interested,’ the woman said, sounding like Millroy at his most definite.
More in fear than anger, Mister Phyllis raised his claws at the woman like a cat backing up and hunching as though to spring at her.
‘Do you want to be hurt very badly?’ the woman asked him, with an edge in her voice that said her patience was almost gone.
For a moment I expected her to hit him.
‘I am giving you five seconds to leave this place,’ the woman said. ‘If you’re not out of here, I’m going to harm you. Don’t think I won’t. Now git.’
Mister Phyllis seemed even smaller as he snatched his hairy jacket from a chair and made for the door. All this while the cat complained and gasped, and moaned, and even then it was hard to tell whether those noises were from Mister Phyllis. They were at the window, distorted by the glare, and then they were gone, swallowed up by the night.
We stood facing each other in the diner, breathing hard, the woman and me.
‘I am very sorry, sonny,’ she said in a gentle voice, and came a little bit closer to me.
I imagined that I had seen her clenching her fists, but no. Her fingers were twisted and swollen like Gaga’s, with arthritis. No one in the Day One Diner was ever this old or this feeble, and I was so unused to being with such a person that I was as amazed by her kindness as I had been by her threats against Mister Phyllis.
‘Who was that horrible man?’
‘I thought you came here with him.’
‘I did, but I don’t know him. He called me out of the blue. He said he knew where Millroy was. I told him I was looking for Millroy too. He could have given me directions. Instead he insisted on coming with me.’
She was looking around the diner as she spoke, blinking in the bright light and the glary whiteness.
‘He thought I might be able to help him,’ the woman said. ‘I probably could if I wanted to.’
She hobbled nearer the counter and leaned over it to get a look at the kitchen.
‘Now I’m not so sure – anyway, why should I?’ She turned to me. ‘What’s your name again?’
‘Alex. You can call me Rusty.’
She just stared at me and did not say anything. She smiled, she nodded. She said, ‘I’m Rosella.’
I thought it was odd that she did not say my name, but she had turned away and was moving heavily to a chair. And even though she had told me her name I found it hard to think of her as ‘Rosella,’ or any other name. Old people did not have first names, or if they did, it seemed disrespectful and wrong for me to say them.
‘Got anything to drink?’
‘Carob tonic. Melon pulp cocktail. Juiced cucumbers. Green drink.’
She made a face.
‘Anything alcoholic?’
‘Grape wine,’ I said.
‘That sounds more like it.’
I poured her a glass of wine and then quickly put the bottle away. Although we had a liquor license I was too young to serve alcohol. But it was late, we were closed, and I was not charging her. Millroy would have said okay – and more than likely Millroy would have changed the wine into water if the police had questioned us.
The woman sipped the wine, then took a longer drink, and swallowed and said, ‘This is a nice place. He’s got a marvelous eye.’
She had purple in the corners of her mouth. She leaned over and put her chunky elbows on the table, and sighed and looked old again, and tired. But I felt grateful that this elderly woman had frightened Mister Phyllis and chased him away.
‘I’ll bet you met him at a birthday party.’ She raised the wineglass to her lips.
‘Mister Phyllis?’
‘No. Harry.’ She put her glass down. She had a purple mustache.
‘Who is Harry?’
‘Millroy. What does he call himself now?’
‘He was Max. He was Uncle Dick for a while. He was Archie. He was Felix. Now he’s Doctor Millroy.’
‘He used to do a lot of children’s parties. He did some acting, too. He was good.’
She was still sipping her glass of grape wine and smacking her lips in admiration as she spoke of Millroy.
‘He was dynamite as a salesman. He sold everything – books, exercise equipment, vitamin supplements. But he was so restless. First it was sales. Then it was schemes. Grow grapes. Raise ducks. Make candy. Dicktronics. Always something.’
The way she praised Millroy made me trust her, and I liked her for her kindness and generosity. She would be kind with me if she was this gentle when she thought of him.
‘But being on the road – all that sitting, all that driving – he got real fat.’ She drank again and gave herself another purple mustache. ‘“I’m a little husky,” he used to say.’
Her laugh was high and youthful, a girl’s reckless laugh, and for a brief moment, during that laughter, she was beautiful.
‘He could get sideways, though.’
In Mashpee and Marston’s Mills and other Cape communities there was one reason for older men acting strangely, but this was the first time I had thought it might have been an explanation for Millroy.
‘Was it because he was in Vietnam?’
The woman squinted at me and with a half-smile said, ‘He was much too old for that.’
‘He had revelations,’ I said. ‘He had been lost in the darkness of his body.’
The woman smiled. ‘You don’t understand. He got very sick. He almost died. He got selfish. He got bossy. He wasn’t very nice.’
I said, ‘He saw clearly the truth about food in the Book, and he was saved.’
I realized that I was pleading with her to agree with me.
‘No’ – the old woman was shaking her head – ‘he was awful. He lost his job. He was fired. His insurance was canceled. He missed payments on his car and the car was taken away. The bank got his house. He worked nights as a security guard for a while. He quarreled. He drove a school bus. After a couple of accidents he was laid off and he ended up bagging groceries in the A & P and saying, “Paper or plastic?” ’
The man she was talking about, the ordinariness of him, this was not Millroy at all – it sounded like Dada.
‘For years he was so defeated,’ the old woman said. ‘He talked about nothing but failure. He had nothing. He said he came from nowhere.’
‘You make him sound so old,’ I said.
The woman looked sharply at me, and stared, and thought, and decided not to smile.
‘At last he just disappeared,’ she said, in a gentle voice. ‘No one knew where he had gone. People thought he would turn up after a week or so – he was just hiding, maybe having mental problems, stress, whatever.’ The woman looked up from her glass of wine and smiled. ‘Years went by. Years and years. And nothing. No Millroy.’
‘Did he used to say stuff like “Punch me in the stomach”?’
‘No. But if someone around him was sick he got very scared. That was another reason he left, I suppose.’
Now I had no idea what the old woman was talking about, and I think she saw that I was confused.
‘He said you got to a point in your life when you either went on living or started dying. He left. To go on living.’
‘He read the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms.’
The woman shrugged. ‘He didn’t come from a religious background. His mother was a runaway teenager, his father was a construction worker. The trouble with self-taught people like Millroy is that they never know when to stop.’
Even though he had mentioned them to me, it was hard fo
r me to think of Millroy with a mother and father, and bagging groceries, driving a school bus. The Millroy I knew worked magic and spoke of having the secret of life.
That reminded me. ‘He works magic.’
‘All that must have come later, after he left. He went to some faraway countries. That’s the part I don’t know. He went looking for another life.’
‘Maybe he found a life.’
‘Was it yours?’ the woman asked.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe he found six lives,’ she said. ‘He was gone a long time.’
‘He still goes away,’ I said. ‘He’s away now.’
The woman was smiling again. ‘I was supposed to be a horrible surprise for him.’
‘He’ll be back.’
‘Millroy doesn’t like surprises.’
That was true. One moment this old woman seemed to know him perfectly, the next moment she did not know him at all, and was describing a stranger.
‘Millroy only wanted one thing in life, and I am the only one who knows that.’
‘To live longer?’
‘To be a writer,’ Rosella said. ‘Now you know.’
She had finished her glass of wine. She was looking around, moving her head in that cramped and straining way of a fat person.
‘This is a nice place,’ she said, and began to move her body as though she was bracing herself to get up and leave.
‘Want another drink?’ I said.
I had been seeing her grapey mustache come and go. I hated noticing it, because I liked her. Even so, purple mustache and all, I wanted her to stay. She was the first person I had met who knew more about Millroy than I did, and I found it a relief to talk to her. There was so much more I wanted to ask her.
‘No thank you. I have to go.’
She got heavily to her feet and steadied herself against a chair as she clapped her hand against her hair, gathering her white wisps and patting them into the great round falling-apart nest of hair on her head.