Millroy the Magician by Paul Theroux
‘You were here first, guys,’ Millroy said. ‘You were waiting for us. Let’s have a cheer for these early Americans.’
Everyone began to clap, with Millroy leading the applause.
That was the show, most of it – and then Millroy went upstairs with the big people, for the interview.
‘You were the hit of the show,’ Millroy said back at the hotel, as we were getting ready to leave for the Cape. He was a new man here, gathering our things, putting his box of tricks together, clearing out.
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I said.
He looked up from packing his suitcase.
‘As usual,’ I said.
‘You were there,’ he said, leaning towards me. ‘You are here, with me.’
‘And what am I doing?’
‘Seeing it all.’
He was in a great hurry to check out of the hotel and leave, and already he was talking about how in one hour we would be back at Pilgrim Pines and have our own food, our own space, our own restroom.
On the road, relaxed, a different man again, he told me about the interview.
‘I let them talk. I listened. Everyone is so lonely. You think important people are going to be strong, but they are much weaker than the average person.’ Millroy was shaking his head. ‘Much easier to manipulate. Their egos are bigger. They need help managing their egos. What’s so funny?’
‘I thought you said “eagles.” ’
He laughed out loud. Then he said, ‘When someone says, “I really want to talk to you,” what they mean is, “I really want you to listen to me.” ’
But I was thinking of the history lesson he had sprung on them, and the black children and the man Otis Godberry, when they had stood up, how proud they were, and how their faces shone when they were applauded. I felt lucky to be there, and had never admired Millroy more.
‘I got the job.’ He said it casually, as though there was nothing more to say, that he had never been in any doubt of it. ‘It’s not a trashy show. It teaches reading and numbers. It’s got intelligent cartoons and good graphics. It’s funny and educational, and it’s still a Boston show, but as it gets stronger it will be picked up by lots of other stations. I got them to accept a live audience – all youngsters.’
‘Mr Phyllis said he doesn’t want them.’
‘His name is Sidney Perkus,’ Millroy said, ‘and I am sure I can handle him.’
‘What else are you doing?’
‘I’ve got a slot.’ He turned to me and wiggled his mustache. ‘They liked my ideas about eating. Mealtime Magic. What do you think?’
‘Sounds good.’
Millroy was in a wonderful mood, and I knew that it was because he was back in the world again. He had not liked being unemployed. Leaving the Barnstable County Fair so suddenly had confused him, and he had told me how he had disliked looking for work, as though he was going around asking people for permission to work magic. But he had found a job on his own terms, and it was a job he wanted, even though it seemed strange to me, his wishing to be a magician on a children’s television show. He was his old self, Millroy the Magician, the one I had first seen at the county fair, who worked magic in a tent, and lived in a trailer, and did not own a television.
That evening he must have been thinking the same things. Breaking the silence, he said, ‘If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have watched that show – wouldn’t even have bought the TV set. I dislike TV evangelists. I hate the unhealthy food that is advertised on TV. And most children’s TV shows are utter trash.’
I was looking at him, thinking Then why are you going on this show?
‘Exactly,’ he said, reading my mind. ‘Because I’m the logical answer, I’m Uncle Dick of Mealtime Magic.’
He did not say anything more until late – after the food, after the restroom sessions, after the baths, after the lights were out. He called through the darkness, from his own dark box of a room.
‘I need you, muffin,’ he said.
I suddenly twitched, a spasm down one side of my body, as I wondered whether I had bolted and latched the swing-out shutters to my little bedroom.
‘As a martyr,’ he said.
For an instant I felt important, because the word was so strange.
‘Know what martyr means in Greek?’
I was going to say that I did not even know what it meant in English.
‘They didn’t teach you that at Mashpee Intermediate?’
He did not wait for me to say no.
‘Martyr,’ Millroy said in the dark. ‘It means witness.’
14
Paradise Park – the children’s TV show – was famous for being educational and having cartoons and safety tips, as well as the Mumbling Humptulips, a bunch of oversize bees, the Frawlies, a family of mice who lived in a log, Princess Vanya in her castle in ‘Crystal Palace,’ Pignut and Dogfish, a pair of peddlers, Alpha Betty and her Dancing Letters, and many other puppets and stuffed toys. But until Millroy joined and became Uncle Dick, the only live person on the program was Mister Phyllis.
‘There’s something about that guy,’ Millroy said.
Mister Phyllis had short flattened-down hair that was purpley-blue and scraped forward, and a tiny wrinkled mouth in his narrow face. He looked like an elderly child, Millroy said, or an anxious monkey. It was his twitching.
I knew Millroy had hated it last Thursday, the day of the audition, when Mister Phyllis had said to me, You’re a charmer. I almost expected Millroy to challenge him to a psychic duel, as he had with Floyd Fewox. But he said nothing, he only watched, he listened closely.
It had been Millroy’s idea to have live children in the studio. Mister Phyllis had not wanted children on the show, either in the audience or on the stage, but Millroy got his way, and on the day of the first real show the studio was full of children.
That day, Mister Phyllis said to me, ‘Sit up front, where I can see you, chicken.’
Millroy winced. I knew it was the word ‘chicken,’ and he hated strangers talking to me, but he said nothing. He stood behind the cameras with Otis Godberry. It was seven minutes to showtime.
‘Where is my chair?’ Mister Phyllis said. ‘Some career criminal has pinched my chair.’
He went through the studio fussing and waggling his fingers.
‘Didn’t I tell you these kids were a mistake? I want someone to find the vandal who annihilated my hat – find her and scratch her cheeks. And if I catch the person who oversweetened my tea I’ll chop her little fingers off.’
Earlier someone had sat on his newspaper. ‘I can see the imprint of his horrid botty on my Globe. He has made it physically impossible for me to touch it, much less read it.’
When he complained about being hungry and Otis Godberry brought him a brown bag lunch, Mister Phyllis said, ‘That is the ugliest sandwich in the whole world.’
With only minutes to go before the show started he began to search for his cat, Tinkum. Where was Tinky’s portable cat box?
‘Find your places, people,’ the studio manager said, clutching his earphones.
‘Get stuffed, sunshine,’ Mister Phyllis said.
Mister Phyllis was groping behind a chair.
‘Quiet on the set. The clock is on –’
‘Shove it up your jumper.’
He wore a white and red sweater, striped like a candy cane, pink pants, pink socks, and bright new sneakers that croaked as he walked. When he lifted his arms his bracelets jangled. This morning he wore make-up, but this color – the gloss on his lips, his rouged cheeks, his powdered nose – made him look less human, like a wicked doll.
‘We’re hearing your jewelry, Phil.’ It was a bottled-up voice on the studio loudspeaker.
‘Why do you think they’re called bangles, peckerhead?’
‘Lose them,’ said the same crampy voice.
‘Don’t get your knickers in a twis
Otis Godberry sighed each time Mister Phyllis spoke, and hearing this last shriek he said, ‘He’s kind of – I don’t know – is it highstrung? I can’t think of the word.’
‘I hate the color of the new set,’ Mr Phyllis was saying. ‘I’ve seen more attractive vomit. The curtains look like a dog’s breakfast. I might as well stick pins in my eyes.’
‘Maladroit,’ Millroy said.
He could always think of the right word.
Otis Godberry was smiling.
‘Epicene,’ Millroy said, and seeing that Otis looked vague, he added, ‘Fruity.’
Otis covered his mouth and chuckled, his eyes shining over his fingers.
‘Hyperbolic,’ Millroy said. ‘But I guess he puts his best foot forward when the cameras are rolling.’
That was true, because when the man with the earphones raised his hands and said, ‘Quiet, please. Five, four, three –’, silence dropped like darkness and the camera moved up to the little kitchen, Mister Phyllis began to whisper slowly, and he winked the way he had with me and crinkled his monkey face into the camera.
‘– whole new show and masses of new friends here at Paradise Park,’ he was saying.
He leaned over his tin sink and turned the faucet handle. Long blobs of water plopped out and made rapping sounds on the metal bowl.
‘Listen. What is the water saying?’
He crouched to put his small round head nearer the faucet.
‘It’s saying splish-splash, splish-splash.’
Smiling into the camera, Mister Phyllis picked up a bar of purple soap. He showed it. He smelled it. He drew a harsh breath, and held the soap near his mouth, as though he were going to eat it.
‘This is my soap. It smells scrumptious. Now what am I going to do with this bar of soap?’
Blink-blink-blink – and all the wrinkles in his face were smiling, and there was a pause before he spoke again.
‘Yes. That’s right. I’m going to wash my hands.’ He was still blinking. His fingernails were pale, his fingers pinky-white and smaller than mine. ‘I’m going to scrub them until they’re immaculate. That’s a big word, isn’t it? It means very clean. That’s how I like to be.’
He slapped at the water and twisted the soap in his hands, lathering suds onto his fingers.
‘I know a song about washing hands.’
He smiled, he chewed, he swallowed, he made monkey cheeks.
‘Scrub a dub, rub a dub
Cakes of soap, to make us hope
For clean and happy hands that –’
‘And if he says anything else to you, I want to hear about it,’ Millroy said, and realizing that Otis Godberry was listening, he added, ‘okay, Alex?’
When Mister Phyllis was finished singing he scooped up his cat Tinkum and began brushing its fur. Turning his back to the children on the studio seats, Mister Phyllis put his face into the camera and said, ‘I bet your cat would like her fur brushed like this.’ In the same slow voice, he told Tinkum how to cross the road and look both ways.
And then two strange things happened. While I watched Mister Phyllis on the TV set in the studio he started to shrink and he shrank smaller until he was so tiny on the screen I could hardly see him.
He was as small as a mouse – I knew this because the Frawlies were mice, little sniffing balls of cloth with button eyes and stiff whiskers. They lived in a tree-stump in Paradise Park and Mister Phyllis and Tinkum sat by the stump watching them.
It was a trick of the camera. Millroy said that the lens shrank Mister Phyllis and his cat, and moved them. They were still big as life in the studio and nowhere near the Frawlies, who were fooling with their lunch and making useful words with their alphabet soup.
That was the first strange thing – tiny Mister Phyllis and tiny Tinky.
The second was when the man in earphones picked up some stuffed toys and Tinkum’s deep dish on the set. He said, ‘They’re in the shot.’
‘Take your fat fingers away from my props or I’ll chop them off,’ Mister Phyllis said.
The man hesitated, and began to speak.
‘Go pick boogies out of your big nose!’ Mister Phyllis said, and he crossed the studio and threw himself into a swivel chair and gave himself a spin, so that his back was turned to the audience and the technicians.
I was so surprised I stood up and gaped at him, and some of the children giggled, hearing Mister Phyllis’s loud voice abusing the man.
‘Shut up, or this will be the last time you ever set foot in here!’
The children went instantly silent, but no one else heard Mister Phyllis, none of the Frawlies, none of the people watching this show on their TV sets.
‘His mike’s off,’ Millroy said in a duck-like voice. ‘And that’s not all.’
He was talking to Otis Godberry, who was frowning nervously at his own big shoes, probably wondering where the voice was coming from. Millroy could talk in five or six different voices, without moving his mouth.
Under the hot lights, Mister Phyllis was saying, ‘Either get those beastly Frawlies off the monitor or else pass me a two-gallon barf bag.’
‘Thirty seconds,’ came the cramped bottled-up voice from the speaker on the wall.
‘Take a flying jump at yourself,’ Mister Phyllis said.
‘Fifteen,’ the crampy voice said after some moments.
‘Your lights are frying Tinky,’ Mister Phyllis said. ‘Find the deep dish and fill it with clean fresh water. There’s something on my shoe – chewing-gum. Oh, bull!’
‘Ten, and counting, nine, eight –’
‘Not on your nelly, bean-brain!’ Mister Phyllis had opened his tiny mouth wide to screech this. But as he spun around in his swivel chair to speak into the camera he made his cute monkey-cheeks again and said slowly, ‘That was fun, wasn’t it, kids? The Frawlies will be back tomorrow, but in the meantime, here are some more adventures from Pignut and Dogfish. Let’s watch.’
He did not watch the puppets, for just then a woman in bib overalls put a dish of water on the floor behind the camera.
The lights dimmed, Mister Phyllis hoisted himself out of the chair and kicked the dish of water, wetting his foot and the leg of his pink pants.
‘That’s not Tinky’s deep dish, you space-case!’
In the cartoon, Pignut and Dogfish, wearing mushroom caps, were learning how to make the letter M – it was large and blue and it loomed over them. Although they struggled to prop it up it kept falling over and turning into the letter W.
‘– then get stuffed!’ Mister Phyllis was saying.
Without moving his mouth, Millroy said, ‘This is all seriously distracting.’
He could not work magic unless he was able to concentrate.
‘I would guess that man takes in vast infusions of processed sugar,’ Millroy said. ‘It’s addictive. He’s manic and emotional. He’s constipated.’ Millroy was still not moving his mouth. ‘Apples have all the fructose you need. And you can cook with honey or fruit juice, substituting it for white sugar.’
‘Is that so?’ Otis Godberry said, looking confused and probably wondering what the connection was between Mister Phyllis’s loud outbursts and the food he ate. But Otis Godberry was game. He said, ‘Just give me a piece of fresh fruit and I’m happy.’
‘Though you’d want to harmonize it,’ Millroy said. ‘Pottage is a good harmonizer.’
‘A mess of pottage,’ Otis said, and smiled. ‘Like Jacob and Esau made.’
‘Jacob was the cook, Esau the hunter who sold his birthright,’ Millroy said. ‘And the fact is that lentil pottage is more important than a birthright. In harmony, it keeps you regular, with big buoyant stools.’
Otis Godberry smiled a painful and confused smile at the direction this conversation had taken.
‘Pull your finger out and find it,’ Mister Phyllis was saying to a studio techni
‘You just want that man to re-think everything he shoves into his mouth,’ Millroy said, with his lips pressed together like a ventriloquist.
The chewing, crunching sound was Pignut and Dogfish walking down a gravel path, satisfied with the monumental letter M they had raised. And as the images flickered out, the studio lights brightened and Mister Phyllis leaned forward in his chair.
‘Can you make the letter M? I want you to try. Draw me some nice M’s and then think of words that start with the letter M.’
His eyes were half closed, his mouth slightly parted.
‘Like mouth. And mother. And muffin.’
He nodded suddenly as though he had just remembered something.
‘Magician begins with an M.’
‘So does monkey,’ Millroy said, because Mister Phyllis was pursing his firm little monkey-mouth.
‘I know a magician. He is our new neighbor. Yes, he is. A magician has just moved to Paradise Park. He lives here all the time now. He does magic for us. His name is Uncle Dick. Shall we go over and visit him?’
But only the camera moved. Mister Phyllis remained in his swivel chair, his legs crossed. He had taken off one of his white sneakers and was scratching his pink sock.
‘I wonder if Uncle Dick has a last name,’ he said.
Millroy smiled, but it was a defiant smile, and I knew he was happy, being on this show, with a large audience in the studio and all those people watching him on television. He seemed to swell and become physically larger when he was pleased, and I had not seen him this size since that day at the Barnstable County Fair, when he had made Packy the elephant vanish for the last time.
‘I was wondering if you had a first name, Mr Phyllis,’ Millroy said in a teasing voice, ‘and what it might be.’
‘That doesn’t sound like magic to me,’ Mister Phyllis said in a similar taunting way. ‘Does it to you, kids?’