Millroy the Magician

by Paul Theroux

  ‘Because I don’t want to hurt him,’ she said. And now she turned in the direction that Mister Phyllis had gone. ‘That horrible man wants to. I didn’t realize that. I’m sorry I came with him. That man frightens me. He could be dangerous. Tell Harry. You know him.’

  But Harry was someone else – the man she had known long ago. It was not Millroy.

  ‘At first I knew him good,’ I said. ‘After a few months I didn’t know him so good. These days he seems like a stranger.’

  ‘That’s him,’ she said, and smiled.

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘I think you’re right for him,’ the woman said, and she reached for me. She patted my shoulder. ‘What’s your real name, girlie?’

  ‘Jilly Farina.’

  And I thought of the sad little hidden person that name belonged to and burst into tears, and tried to stop, and sobbed even harder, with my hands trying to hide my face, and the tears running through my fingers.

  ‘Please don’t go,’ I said, with tears dripping from my mouth.

  ‘I can’t stay,’ she said. She hugged me. She was big but weak, with soft arms, no muscles, just elderly cushions. ‘Millroy doesn’t want me here.’

  ‘I don’t care. I want you to stay.’ I felt so safe with this old woman, as I once had with Millroy – safe, protected, needed. As I once had with Mumma.

  ‘I want Millroy to be happy,’ she said. ‘You should want it too. You’re right – he is a magician.’

  ‘I can’t help him,’ I said. I was sniffling. ‘I don’t know him anymore.’

  ‘He needs you.’

  ‘He left me. He does it all the time. Just goes off.’

  ‘If he went away without you that means he’s counting on you to wait for him.’

  I was in despair, and turned away to cry again.

  ‘He chose you,’ the woman said.

  ‘How do you know so much about Millroy?’ I said, meaning that I did not really believe her.

  She held me, got a grip just then, as though feebly indicating that she did not want to answer. She shook her gray head slowly from side to side.

  ‘Are you his Gaga?’

  ‘His what?’

  ‘His granny.’

  ‘No, dear, I’m not.’

  ‘His mumma?’

  ‘No.’

  With each question I had asked she had loosened her grip on me a bit more and now she let go and stood at a little distance with a sad face.

  ‘I was like you once.’

  It was the saddest thing I had ever heard. She said nothing more after that, only looked at me with her old sorry face and then went out of the diner, moving slowly, shifting one big leg after the other, and holding her hands and fingers a certain way, as though to balance and help.

  After she was gone I was alone and shivering in the dark, and I prayed hard for the night to pass.

  32

  Leaving Millroy and the Day One Diner and everything else would be like stripping off old clothes, I thought – but no, it was like putting them on. It was confusing, going home after so long, and where was home anyway?

  I crept off just at sunrise and I was out of the diner before the first Sons and Daughters arrived for work. That was when I felt it. Walking down Essex Street, taking the short-cut to South Station, I saw a person I took to be T. Van come towards me in the drizzly dark and I hid in a donut shop and thought: Something is different.

  At the P and B bus stop I had the same feeling of unexpectedness, and in the bus itself heading south on the expressway, watching for the bus-rider’s landmarks so I would know that the first hills and meadows were close – the gas tanks, the Globe building and Fine Steaks – it came to me again: Something is different. I could not understand it, because I was going home. Was I getting lost?

  Maybe it was my trying to hurry away from Millroy and failing. I was amazed on the bus when a man across the aisle from me raised his Herald and slapped the folds flat. I saw Day One Church Assailed Again by Clerics in a headline, and in smaller print Rev. Millroy.

  He’ll hate that, I thought at first, and then: What is it doing there?

  At that moment this sense of something different became a sense of something wrong. I don’t want my name in the paper, he used to say. My secret was out. Millroy was on the bus – out here, in general – and I was left feeling entangled, as though I could not get away from him, could not leave the diner without running into him. Bumping into someone can be much worse than constantly being with them, the shock of it, and I hardly knew him now though it seemed everyone else did.

  That was why I had to leave Boston and the Day One Diner. The diner had become like home to me, and I was happier than I had ever been with Gaga in Marston’s Mills, or Dada in Mashpee. But Millroy had grown less and less familiar to me, and finally – with last night’s visit of Rosella (but I thought of her only as the old woman) – Millroy seemed like a total stranger, almost an enemy.

  I did not know him now. I was afraid to see him again. And each time I remembered us together I shivered. That headline in the Herald made me sick. What was the Day One Church? Who was Rev. Millroy? I saw Millroy feeding me, spooning ‘herbage’ into my mouth, taking me through the night-time Boston streets to watch people eating, waking me up with the sound of his snorts and bad dreams and pleading, Talk to me, angel.

  These remembrances frightened me like the close-calls that memory makes much worse when you think about it a long time afterwards. Maybe something terrible had already happened to Millroy, but I could not bear to buy the newspaper and read it. Millroy was everywhere, but who was he?

  When the bus stopped at Plymouth to pick up and drop off passengers I tried calling Dada from a pay phone, but a school-teacherish recording told me the line had been disconnected.

  The new person across the aisle, a man in a suit who had gotten on at Plymouth, had opened his Wall Street Journal. I seriously wondered whether Millroy was mentioned in that one too. It’s not ladylike to read over someone’s shoulder.

  I kept reading, I never understood people’s sarcasm anyway and it was not until four more exits had gone past that I realized that the man might have been talking to me.

  Ladylike? I got so confused I stuck my thumb in my mouth and kept it there until we got to the canal.

  I felt better when we crossed the Sagamore Bridge to the Cape, but after we passed the Junior High, the Mashpee Baptist, the Grange Hall, the Trading Post, the Gas and Go, Ma Glockner’s and Mister Donut I felt different again. I thought how looking at where you came from through the road dirt on a bus window can make you feel like a failure.

  I saw stapled to a fence a poster with an elephant on it advertising the Barnstable Country Fair, and laughed. The sound frightened me, as though someone else had laughed. Then I walked the whole way from the rotary to Main Street and figured, Am I walking because I’m too chicken to arrive?

  If home meant these winding back roads lined with long straggly grass and no sidewalks and twisted trees with branches growing over them, and all these little wooden painted signs, then I had forgotten it all. I felt weak and pathetic just walking along them, keeping to the side of the white line where there were torn plastic cups and crushed beer cans and here and there a dead stiff squirrel and cars and trucks going past me, taking no notice.

  Pine Street was a lonely pair of wheeltracks, and Dada’s driveway was tufty with weeds and as long as a back road. The sound of my Day One shoes crunching gravel made me feel small. But I knew the sound would have been more terrible on Gaga’s driveway, which was why I was here.

  Dada’s trailer was just the same, rust-busted metal collapsing on its cinder blocks. I rapped the flimsy door with hurting knuckles before there was any movement inside. Then a face: Vera Turtle. Her nice green eyes had red rims and her lips were swollen from pain, as though Dada had hit her very hard. She had a balled-up hanky in her hand.<
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  ‘I ain’t cryun,’ she said, and pushed the door as though she had been expecting me.

  ‘I couldn’t call you – the phone’s been disconnected.’

  ‘I use the one at the Tradun Post,’ Vera said. ‘But no one knew where you were. We looked all over. Even the police didn’t know nuthun. I was a wreck.’

  She pronounced it veck with her teeth on her lips which made the word seem worse. She was very thin. She looked unhappy but lovely, her misery sharpening her features, making her gaunt and more beautiful and giving her a look of intelligence.

  ‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Here I am.’

  ‘You’re too late, lovey. And what have you gone and done to your hair again?’

  My Alex haircut, my Alex clothes. I was stepping into the body of the trailer, which still smelled of old clothes and Muttrix and Vera’s cologne which was a syrupy clinging odor like fresh paint. The place was neater than I had ever seen it, and there was no cooking in the air – as though she had stopped eating. The television was on, yakking – a big face on the big screen.

  ‘So where’s Dada?’

  Vera let out a loud sob that rattled me so badly I burst into tears, and then so did she. The way our weeping echoed in the small tin trailer told me that it was empty and that we were alone.

  It was unbearable to think of that sick man dying, all his torments, but I could stand his death, the fact of it, his being gone for good. Yet it was the worst news I could have received, because I had been counting on him to take me back, so that I would not have to go to Gaga’s. I was sad, I remembered how Millroy had praised Dada at the Gas and Go, and I felt guilty and ashamed. When Dada had been alive he was present, huge and horrible, every minute, and so the empty space he left was bigger and more awful than average.

  I was also thinking that the worst part of feeling guilty is being weak, and knowing that you will agree to almost anything.

  Vera was still talking but I was not listening – only thinking of Dada dead. It was now too late to say or do anything, but what would I have said if I had found him alive?

  I love you would have been a lie. It was a truer sign of my feelings that I had said nothing and that he died knowing that I had gone away. Today I was back, alone, empty-handed, suffering. We had had what we both deserved. There had not been time for either of us to tell lies or to pretend our feelings were different.

  If I had found him dying I would have said things I did not mean, and would have felt like a cheat.

  ‘I am not going to cry no more,’ Vera was saying, and then cried.

  I was sorry for Vera Turtle, on her own in this small rusty trailer. And sorry, too, because she was so glad to see me.

  We sat talking near the loud crazy television, not listening to it.

  ‘You must be real hungry,’ she said, after a while. ‘You ought to eat somethun.’

  I said yes, although it was she who looked starved – her grief like malnutrition.

  ‘Let me take you for a burger up Reddy’s.’

  I thought, Please, no, and felt sick.

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said.

  Vera snorted, another sad noise, and I hoped she was not crying again. Her back was turned, she was headed to the door.

  ‘Turn the TV off?’ I said.

  ‘Nah. We’d just have to turn it back on again when we got back. Matter of factly, it’s good for keeping burglars away.’

  I took that to mean that it was never off, and just as we left the trailer I thought I saw Millroy’s face on the TV screen, and he was talking fast, his mustache jumping. Or was I imagining it because of my gloomy mood – the disruption of death?

  It was early afternoon on a steamy day in July, gray skies and blowing trees, and the grass looking black from the bad light, the sort of hot headachey day that made you wonder about summer and hope for a sudden shower to clear the air. As always on the Cape I had the sense of other people – summer people, vacationers, people with money – driving past us on the main roads, and on these back roads there was just us, in old cars, going nowhere.

  This past winter had left injuries on Dada’s Toyota – rust and scratches and scummy paint, dented door panels, the coughs of its blurting exhaust. That was how I knew I was home here – nothing worked right.

  Vera was talking slowly as she drove us over the Mashpee line and down the Old Barnstable Road short-cut, past the public housing in the pine woods and the house trailers in the woodlots.

  ‘They get them lawn ornaments in Stop and Shop.’

  I heard that with Millroy’s ears: Lon onnaments in Stawp and Shawp.

  ‘I have no use for money anymore,’ Vera said, meaning that Reddy’s was a fancy restaurant where you splurged.

  But it wasn’t. It was a greasy roadside drive-in at a little crossroads mall in East Falmouth that sold old age and heart disease with its red hots, and it was famous for the roaches you sometimes found in the mustard pot. Reddy’s sign was flashing neon showing wiggly flames and a devil in a chef’s hat spearing a sizzling hot dog with a pitchfork.

  ‘Smoking or non-smoking?’

  ‘Non,’ Vera said before I could butt in. She smiled at me as though apologizing and explained softly, ‘It makes me throw up now.’

  Walking in, I began seeing it all with Millroy’s eyes. Was that the difference I had been noticing since early morning? Millroy had gotten inside me and was directing my attention and my thoughts, determining my reaction. He had converted me. Millroy had replaced all my previous judgements, and my feelings too, with his own.

  It should have been helpful to me, yet it disturbed me, because I saw Dada’s death that way – his way. It had been pneumonia brought on by a kidney ailment, Vera said, and the Millroy reasoning inside me said it was too much fat, too much red meat, too much alcohol, all that smoking. It was bad food and congested bowels.

  Millroy logic explained life and death, and this explanation took the place of grief.

  The poisons ate him up, Millroy would have said. His food destroyed him.

  It was a pity but he himself was to blame.

  It’s not a sin – I hate that word, Millroy would have said. It’s an error – in this case, a fatal error.

  ‘What are you thinkun about?’ Vera said, picking up a menu from the back of the napkin dispenser.

  ‘Dada.’

  ‘God called him,’ Vera said.

  No, I thought.

  ‘God took him,’ she said.

  No, Dada did it to himself.

  ‘He tried holdun on. He was fightun hard. It was no good.’

  I was surprised by my calmness, yet I went on hearing Millroy’s voice in my ear.

  Saying: You do not cry over someone who turns their back on the miracle of God’s food. Who does not value life enough to want to live longer. Who deliberately abuses their own body – even if it is your own Dada. Bury this mistake and walk away and learn from it. The human body is biodegradable.

  Grief was not a Day One feeling.

  Was this the difference? That I was different?

  ‘They got all kinds of good stuff here,’ Vera said, fussing with the menu. She was thin but she seemed more nervous than hungry.

  Reddy’s menu showed the same devil as on the sign out front, with the pitchfork and the hot dog, looking wicked. But my menu was dirty and so gluey with old jam my fingers stuck to it and I could not let go.

  ‘They fix some delicious chickun,’ Vera said. ‘Real tender. It’ll melt in your mouth.’

  Poor Vera – you’re killing yourself, too.

  ‘I’ll have a banana,’ I said.

  ‘Banana split, honey?’

  ‘A plain banana.’

  She looked at me as though I was whacko, but then winced sympathetically, maybe thinking that Dada’s death had crazed me a little. That was understandable.

  ‘Have a lime rickey,’ she said. ‘L
ime rickeys are real healthy. They got juice in them.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I should get a cheeseburger,’ Vera said. ‘I need the vitamins. I’ve been feelun so blah. It’s the cryun that makes you weak. It drains you.’

  A waitress in a red dress – a devil on her apron, horns on her paper hat – said, ‘Can I get you a cocktail or a beverage?’

  ‘Vodka tonic,’ Vera said, and with Millroy’s ears I heard vogka tawnic. ‘And she’ll have a lime rickey.’

  ‘Have you decided on your meal?’

  ‘Chicken wing fingers Diabolo, a side order of red hots, and a vanilla frappé,’ Vera said. ‘And bring her a banana.’

  ‘Just a banana?’

  ‘I already asked her that.’

  The waitress wrote this down and went to get the drinks.

  We sat in silence, waiting. Vera sighing in her throat, more like grieving than breathing. I looked around with Millroy’s eyes.

  Reddy’s was small and dark, with wisps of grease in the air, the stink of hot fat and burned meat and scorched blood. It was not the smell of food, it was the stink of death. Along one wall were booths where we sat, and on the other side of the room was a bar counter, where some big paunchy men in tee-shirts and baseball hats were drinking beer and watching television. Over the bar were red dancing devils, with tails, grinning, hot dogs speared on their pitchforks.

  Millroy would have laughed, because it was perfect, the devils cut out of red painted plywood, with a border of flames, the pointy horns and long tails, the burgers, the sausages and red hots and grease, like a sort of eating hell. Weenie worship.

  Being fat is being blind, Millroy had once said.

  In the other booths people were eating noisily, wolfing burgers and red hots, and even their children had big soft bellies and cheeks shining with grease. They all ate in the urgent sulky way that so fascinated Millroy on his night-time walks through Boston when he peered into restaurant windows – and he probably did it in other cities these days, the Day One cities, watching people stuff their mouths and chew. The eaters at Reddy’s were pale, cranky, misshapen, hobbling, unhealthy, with a hungry look that Millroy called despair – lost souls, slowly dying, even Vera sipping her vodka tonic, watching the waitress setting out the chicken wing fingers Diabolo.