by Paul Theroux
‘What time is it, guys?’
‘It’s mealtime!’
‘Who says mealtime is magic time?’
‘Uncle Dick!’
By expanding this eating segment and shrinking Puppet Time and Cartoon Carnival, Millroy got his own way – the sort of food show he had asked for – without changing the name. He still kept his magic boxes and cabinets, but he also had kegs of fruit and vegetables, and bowls and jugs with his name on them, and a juicer he called ‘DJ’ because he refused to advertise any commercial products.
‘What should I do with this bushel of apples, guys?’
‘Juice them!’
‘And what about the juice?’
It turned out to be a half-gallon of frothing brown liquid.
‘Drink it!’
He drank it down – he could pour that much and more down his throat at one go, without gulping or spilling, and he finished it before the children stopped yelling.
Children liked making noise, he said. They hungered to scream. It was a physical necessity, like blinking and yawning. After those screams they needed rest – storms and calms made up a youngster’s disposition, which was why they were capable of working magic.
‘I need a volunteer,’ he said one day. ‘Who wants to help Uncle Dick?’
Every child in the studio jumped up and waved, trying to attract Millroy’s attention. But he chose me.
‘What’s your name, son?’
‘Alex,’ I said.
It pleased me that no one knew my secret, that I was nobody, a girl from Marston’s Mills named Jilly Farina, and not a boy named Alex, Millroy’s teenaged son.
‘You’re going to be my little helper,’ he said. ‘It seems young Herma-Rae over here has lost her new wrist-watch.’
It was not until that moment that the little girl realized her watch was gone, and there was panic on her tight tearful face.
‘Some magicians just tease you,’ Millroy said. ‘People who tease you are burgers and sadists, especially grown-ups. Uncle Dick will never do that to you’ – he was speaking to all the children on the sloping bank of seats – ‘so let’s find that wrist-watch, Alex.’
I hesitated and then thought, Alex – that’s me.
‘This little guy is going to be my dowsing rod, and don’t worry about that job description. When he’s finished, you’re going to know what a dowsing rod is.’
How it happened I do not know but, without touching me, Millroy steered me across the studio and my whole body focussed on the boom microphone, hanging over Paradise Park like a fishing rod. The wrist-watch (how did it get there without anyone seeing?) was buckled around the top, fifteen feet from the floor.
After handing the watch over to the little girl, Herma-Rae, Millroy changed a boy’s signet ring into a bing cherry, and I ate it.
‘That’s full of fructose,’ Millroy said in his Uncle Dick voice, ‘and it doesn’t cause cancer like the cherries you get in ice-cream stores.’
And the signet ring turned up in the Frawlies’ tree-stump.
At the end of the show we did the Indian basket, but this time Millroy himself crawled inside, and after I tapped the basket with a magic wand he vanished – opening it, I revealed not Uncle Dick but the whole family of buzzing Humptulips. While they jostled in the basket, looking demented, the alphabet cartoons started, Pignut and Dogfish discussing the letter T and all the words you could make with it.
‘Did you miss me?’ Millroy said, reappearing in the Indian basket after the cartoons.
The kids screamed ‘Yes!’ and were happy making noise for a while, as though they had drawn a deep breath.
‘Are you sure you missed me?’ Millroy asked, and encouraged them, adding, ‘Let it out, guys!’
You could hear their loud voices ringing against the pipes and tubes of the metal chairs and vibrating in the steel hoods of the bright lights. Their yells set the whole studio twanging.
‘Now where’s my little helper?’
‘Here I am.’
‘Little Al,’ he said.
I liked being Little Al. I put the Indian basket away. I turned the crank of the wind-up record-player. I passed more bing cherries around. I pulled the curtains. I scooped up Boobie. I chose a small girl from the audience to help me clean the blackboard.
I was not nervous. The day before, in the trailer at Buzzards Bay, Millroy had coached me for three hours. I was prepared for it all. His magic filled me with confidence.
I thought to myself, I’m on TV.
Riding back in the Ford later that morning, I kept thinking how easy he had made it for me, and what fun it was to have been under the bright lights of the studio, with the cameras on me, my face in the monitor, part of the show.
I said, ‘I liked doing that.’
It made me uncomfortable when Millroy did not reply.
I said, ‘I mean, you never see ugly little guys like me on TV.’
It was as though he had disappeared inside his own body, not just unusually quiet, but simply not there, and so silent, so absent I stuck my thumb into my mouth.
I was looking at the wooden totem pole at Exit Five when he suddenly said, ‘You gave me an idea.’
18
I’m going to be on the show again, I thought. Might even be in charge!
Millroy had the power to fill anyone, even someone like me, with the strongest confidence. I thought just then in the car how he should have had children of his own, lots of them, and how his own children would never fear him – never lock their bedroom door, never hide when he raised his voice, never leave home when he began to drink, but only love him. He could make the weepiest person feel happy – after a pep talk from him you believed in yourself. I was Little Alex. I was full of beans. Maybe I had a hidden talent for magic myself!
You’re going to live for two hundred years, was the sort of thing he said. And you’re going to be happy the whole time.
After his coaching me and my looking back on my performance on the show it did not seem so strange that he might say, You did so well today that you can do it all by yourself from now on.
Wasn’t that what he was going to tell me? Not that I wanted to be a star. I was just sick of sitting around.
And why shouldn’t I be eager for him to give me this job and costume? He had turned me into Little Alex, so the next logical step was to give this boy something to do. I imagined how it might be for me as Alex, or Little Al, or even Crazy Al, helping out each time there was a job to be done. I liked the idea of being the sort of favorite sidekick and helper that I had been for him that week at the Barnstable County Fair, when he had dressed me up in a sequinned dress and a cape and called me ‘My lovely assistant, Annette,’ and I went click-clicking in my high heels across the stage.
He had changed my life. I could hardly remember the person I had been. I was stronger – still small, but tougher. I ate big fibrous beany meals and piles of fruit, flat bread and honey and broiled fish. He made porridgy soups out of barley, and red-lentil pottage. He allowed sour yogurt and sour cheese, but hardly any meat, only lamb when I had a meat-fit, and even then he called it a sacrifice. He made salads of flowers and vine leaves, he offered me handfuls of alfalfa sprouts. He was crazy about figs, and he was very big on garlic (‘It’s a natural antibiotic – completely mends your immune system’). Now and then he mixed some water with a grapey liquid that tasted like weak inky wine.
In Millroy’s Airstream trailer I slept soundly, dreamlessly, hardly moving, and woke up feeling bright, my head completely clear. At Gaga’s I had always felt weary and fearful and guilty and a little weepy – anxious at the thought that without warning the old woman might hit me or scream at me, or just yell at the walls, freak out in frustration. I was calmer now, I was healthy. I told Millroy how different I felt.
‘Your body’s working nicely,’ he said. ‘You have spirit. That’s the whole point. Your hair
’s healthy, your skin’s elastic, you’ve got tonus. And you feel like a good person, sort of virtuous. Unapologetic.’
It was true, it was a sense of strength. And he had done it. He had fed me and looked after me.
‘I know that feeling,’ he said.
Though I did not dare say so, I also felt that part of me belonged to him, because he had improved me and made me healthy and happy – that he was responsible, and that I would not have happened without him. He had taken over the care and operation of my body, the way real parents were supposed to do. But I did not say it, because I did not know how to put it into words, to thank him for it, without making him think that my body was his to use. It was small and skinny and he was helping it grow healthier, but did that give him any rights to touch me? He did not try or even seem interested but even so the answer was flat no.
‘It’s neat,’ I said. ‘I love feeling like this.’
He was sluicing barley and beans in a shallow pan, washing them and picking out the pebbles. I’m just fooling around here, experimenting with an amazing bread recipe. The Bible was open on the counter at the Book of Ezekiel.
‘Stands to reason,’ he said.
He went on flopping loops of the wet beans in the pan, like a prospector panning for gold.
‘Because you’re regular,’ he said.
It was his favorite word, and it was a major feature of his daily routine. It took longer than most meals and just the thought of it made him serious. It was also a form of meditation, he said.
‘It’s more than purging – it’s purification. Get all those poisons out of your body.’ He always told me to take my time. ‘And it’s usually a good idea to reduce your restrictive clothing and to loosen all your garments.’
Even a hat, or tight shoes, or a knotted necktie, could be serious obstacles to digestion, never mind regularity, Millroy said.
I had my own lock for the restroom in the trailer, my own section in the two-basin sink, and my own hopper. So did Millroy. It was important to him, he said.
‘If I ever have to travel without my Airstream – which God forbid – I would never go anywhere without my Soft Seat.’
He took this contraption to Boston every morning in his Uncle Dick briefcase.
‘Is that a life preserver?’ I asked when I first saw it. It was the sort of rubber ring you sometimes found floating in kiddie pools.
No, it was an inflatable toilet seat, a large, dough-shaped cushion for when he was away from the trailer. It was his own invention, and soon after we started going to Boston every morning he made one for me. But he said it was not a good idea to develop a dependency on it, because the seat was only part of the problem – it was the room itself, the locks, the atmosphere, the lack of privacy, the sudden noises, the stinks and perfumes, the sight of other people’s feet.
‘Gaga was always banging on the door and telling me to hurry up.’
‘See what I mean? Your grandmother’s worse than a burger. She’s a savage.’
He was odd, he was unexpected, but he was gentle, and he was fun. And I felt more comfortable now as a boy than I had a girl. I was the right size and shape for a young boy: I was a small fourteen-year-old girl but I looked like a normal twelve-year-old boy. I realized how Millroy had been right. It was easy for a boy to be living this life with Millroy, in the trailer at Pilgrim Pines, and going with him to the TV studio. It would have been very hard for a girl, all those questions, like Who is this guy? and Where’s your mother?
Millroy made it even simpler by treating me as a boy, never crowding me or intruding when we were inside the Airstream, and always calling me Alex when we were outside of the trailer. He almost convinced me that I was a boy. I began to look at boys’ clothes with a new curiosity and interest that Millroy himself encouraged. Neat pair of sneakers there, Allie, he might say. That is a very cool baseball hat.
Millroy was always in disguise too, not just his clothes but the hats he wore, the dark glasses, the way he trimmed his mustache now. Floyd Fewox would not have recognized him. And did the Reverend Baby Huber have any idea that the bulgy silver Airstream trailer in space 28 belonged to Uncle Dick, the star of Boston TV’s Paradise Park? He was Millroy there, and I was his silent kid, but as soon as we set off we became Uncle Dick and his talented son Alex.
It was a long way to travel, from Pilgrim Pines to Boston and back, almost sixty miles each way.
‘It strengthens me,’ Millroy said.
‘Coming all the way back here to eat?’
‘Yes, but most of all to watch him eat.’
By this time he had washed his soaked beans and was kneading them with the barley and wheat flour and lentils and butter, still glancing at the Book of Ezekiel from time to time.
‘It’s human, of course,’ Millroy said. ‘We love to hear that someone has a terrible weakness.’
I was thinking, Do we?
‘It really does my heart good to hear Huber saying “I love hot dogs” or “I can’t stop munching Nachos” – or seeing him with mayonnaise smeared on his lips, or a dab of ketchup on the tip of his nose as he eats his so-called Real Good Fries.’
I was thinking, Do you?
‘It gives me such a boost to see him gnawing a bucket of hot wings from Kentucky Fried Chicken.’
I was thinking, Does it?
‘I don’t say it makes me feel superior,’ Millroy said. ‘But it makes me feel powerful within myself. Strengthens my resolve.’
‘You would have loved Gaga and Dada if you had gotten to know them better.’
‘I know them well. I see them clearly. And I want you to see them as I do.’
He trusted me, he said. He believed in me. He said that I gave him ideas, and that none of this would have happened to him if it had not been for me. He would still have been Millroy the Magician, making an elephant disappear at Foskett’s Fun-O-Rama. But I had liberated him. He had followed me, not the other way around. And together we had taken over Paradise Park. He owed all his success to me.
‘You are my secret,’ he said. ‘And you are much bigger than you think.’
I did not ask why. I did not want to think about the reason. Yet all this talk made me happy. It meant I had a purpose, a life to live, real work, not just someone he pitied, tagging along. And it meant that my disguise was complete. I was a whole made-up person, Little Al.
I looked out of the window at the cold Cape Cod Canal as Millroy slipped his lump of dough into the oven. It was now early November, and school had been in session for almost two months. It was classes, books, teachers, the months of dullness and work and rain and muddy sports. The yellow school bus with Mister Pocknett at the wheel had stopped flashing its lights in the morning at the corner of Prospect Street and River Road, and they no longer waited for Jilly Farina, just drove off, the other kids muttering, Jellyfish must have moved. Yes, I was somewhere else, and I did not want to go back, because that meant that I would have had to turn into a small girl once again, afraid of bigger people and loud noises, heading nowhere in the dark.
In the summer I had always felt free – I could do as I liked, I could dream without interruption, as long as I was alone. In the hot dusty summer air, in the yellow woods of Marston’s Mills, or even for my usual week at Camp Farley in Mashpee with the 4H Club, I had visions of happiness. When September came I had to wake up and go back. But now it was November and I had no wish to go back, ever. Millroy had shown me that life could be simple and you could be fearless and have fun, eating right and praising God – ‘or Good, as I prefer to call the Almighty’ – by doing so. Living well was a form of prayer. Taking care of your body was a way of giving thanks, because your life was a gift to treasure and endow with health, not just for now but for two centuries.
So Millroy said, in those words. And he claimed I had succeeded.
‘I can tell by looking at you that you’re faithful, angel.’
In t
his short time after he had shoved that lump of his beany dough mixture into the oven he was now removing it, hardened and browned, like a failed cake or a huge ugly cookie.
This year would be different from any other, I thought. I was rescued, and even though I did not know where I was going I was sure that I was better off with Millroy than without him. He swore that he felt the same about me.
‘I am going to call this “Ezekiel four-nine bread,” ’ he said, breaking it into two hunks and handing one to me.
Then he gave me the bad news, and the worst of it for me was that he thought it was good news.
‘Muffin, you have given me a dynamite idea for this show,’ he had said.
It was later now. I was trying not to sulk, and we were eating bowls of pottage with fitches and figs, and thick slices of Ezekiel bread. I had been waiting for nothing, except to be disappointed.
‘When you were walking back and forth, calling the kids by name, arranging the props, setting up the tricks, I was marveling at your authority. You saw how those little guys looked at you?’
Yes, just dying for me to do something wrong – drop a pot or trip over a wire, so that they could laugh at me. I said so to Millroy.
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘They weren’t afraid. They weren’t nervous. If they performed something it was an exercise of their own free will.’
‘They would have done the same for anyone, even someone like Mister Phyllis.’
‘Heaven help them.’
‘They would have been pumped.’
‘But he would have intimidated them.’
So what? Some of these kids looked dangerous and stupid, and drooled and smelled and laughed too loud and wore their baseball hats on sideways and backward. Why not intimidate them a little? I would not have minded if they had been afraid of me.
‘See, this is a children’s show,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s their own show.’
He talked at his own speed. It was his confidence and his rhythm. No one could hurry him, as he smacked his lips and paused. No one would want to.
