3
Mr Robertson Davies (may his death be postponed a thousand years) has suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that our attitude toward magic and magicians in a large part indicates our attitude toward reality, and that our attitudes on the matter of reality indicate our attitudes toward the whole world of wonders in which we find ourselves - nothing but babes in the woods, even the oldest of us (even Mr Davies himself, one must believe), where some of the trees bite and some confer great mystic favors - a property in their bark, no doubt.
Hilly Brown very much felt he did exist in a world of wonders. This had always been his attitude, and it never changed no matter how many 'introubles' he had. The world was as mystically beautiful as the glass balls his mother and father hung on the Christmas tree each year (Hilly longed to hang some too, but experience had taught him - as it had his parents - that to hand a glass ball to Hilly was to issue that glass ball's death-warrant). To Hilly the world was as gorgeously perplexing as the Rubik's Cube he had gotten for his ninth birthday (the Cube was gorgeously perplexing for two weeks, anyway, and then Hilly began to solve it routinely). His attitude toward magic was thus predictable - he loved it. Magic was made for Hilly Brown. Unfortunately, Hilly Brown, like Dunstable Ramsey in Davies' Deptford Trilogy, was not made for magic.
On the occasion of Hilly's tenth birthday, Bryant Brown had to stop at the Derry Mall to pick another present up for his son. Marie had called him on his coffee break. 'My dad forgot to get Hilly anything, Bryant. He wanted to know if you'd stop at the Mall and buy him a toy or something. He'll pay you when his check comes in.'
'Sure,' Bryant said, thinking: And pigs will ride broomsticks.
'Thanks, honey,' she said gratefully. She knew perfectly well that her father - who now took dinner with them six and seven nights a week instead of the previous five -was the sandpaper on her husband's soul. But he had never complained, and for this Marie loved him dearly.
'What did he think Hilly might like?'
'He said he'd trust your judgment,' she said.
Typical, Bryant thought. So he had found himself in one of the Mall's two toy-stores that afternoon, looking at games, dolls (the dolls for boys going under the euphemism 'action-figures'), models, and kits (Bryant saw a large chemistry set, thought of Hilly mixing things up in test-tubes, and shuddered). Nothing seemed quite right; at ten his eldest son had reached an age when he was too old for baby-toys and too young for such sophisticated items as box kites or gas-powered model planes. Nothing seemed quite right, and he was pressed for time. Hilly's birthday party was scheduled for five, and it was a quarter past four now. That barely left him time to get home.
He grabbed the magic set almost at random. Thirty New Tricks!, the box said. Good. Hours of Fun for the Young Prestidigitator!, the box said. Also good. Ages 8-12, the box said. Fine. Safety- Tested for the Young Conjurer, the box said, and that was best of all. Bryant bought it and smuggled it
the house under his jacket while Ev Hillman was leading Hilly, David, and three of Hilly's friends in a rousing off-key chorus of 'Sweet Betsy from Pike.'
'You're just in time for birthday cake,' Marie said, kissing him.
'Wrap this first, will you?' He handed her the magic kit. She gave it a quick glance and nodded. 'How's it going?'
'Fine,' she said. 'When it was Hilly's turn to pin the tail on the donkey, he tripped on a table leg and stuck the pin into Stanley Jernigan's arm, but that's all so far.'
Bryant cheered up at once. Things really were going well. The year before, while wriggling into Hilly's 'neatest all-time hiding place' during a game of hide-and-go-seek, Eddie Golden had torn his leg open on a strand of rusty barbed wire Hilly had always managed to miss (Hilly had, in fact, never even seen that old piece of sticker-wire at all). Eddie had to go to the doctor, who treated him to three stitches and a tetanus shot. Poor Eddie had had a bad reaction to the shot and had spent the two days following Hilly's ninth birthday in the hospital.
Now Marie smiled and kissed Bryant again. 'Dad thanks you,' she said. 'And so do L'
Hilly opened all his presents with pleasure, but when he opened the magic set, he was transported with joy. He rushed to his grandfather (who had by that time managed to wolf down half of Hilly's chocolate devil's food birthday cake and was even then cutting himself another slice) and hugged him fiercely.
'Thanks, Grampy! Thanks! Just what I wanted! How did you know?'
Ev Hillman smiled warmly at his grandson. 'I guess I ain't forgot everythin' about being a boy,' he said.
'It's boss, Grampy! Wow! Look. Stanley! Thirty-four tricks! Look, Barney - '
Whirling to show Barney Applegate, he whacked the corner of the box into Marie's coffee-cup, breaking it. Coffee sprayed and scalded Barney's arm. Barney screamed.
'Sorry, Barney,' Hilly said, still dancing. His eyes were so bright they seemed almost afire. 'But look! Neat-o, huh? Awesome!'
With the three or four gifts for which Bryant and Marie had saved and then ordered far in advance from an FAO Schwartz catalogue to make sure they would arrive in time thus relegated to the status of spear-carriers in a jungle epic, Bryant and Marie exchanged a telepathic glance.
Gee, honey, I'm sorry, her eyes said.
Well, what the hell ... that's life with Hilly, his replied.
They both burst out laughing.
The partygoers turned to look at them for a moment - Marie never forgot David's round, solemn eyes - and then turned back to watch Hilly open his magic set.
'I wonder if there's any of that maple-walnut ice cream left,' Ev wondered aloud. And Hilly, who that afternoon believed his grandfather to be the greatest man on earth, ran to get it.
4
Mr Robertson Davies has also suggested in his Deptford Trilogy that the same great truism which applies to writing, painting, picking horses at the track, and telling lies in a sincerely believable way, also applies to magic: some people got it, and some people don't.
Hilly didn't.
In Davies's Fifth Business, the first of the Deptford books, the narrator, enchanted by magic (he is a boy of about Hilly's age), does any number of tricks -badly - for an approving, uncritical audience of one (a much younger boy of about David's age), with this ironic result: the older boy discovers the younger has the great natural talent for prestidigitation he himself lacks. This younger boy puts the narrator completely to shame, in fact, the first time he ever tries to palm a shilling.
On this last point, the similarity broke down; David Brown had no more talent for magic than Hilly Brown did. But David adored his brother, and would have sat in patient, attentive, and loving silence if, instead of trying to make the Jacks run from the burning house or to make Victor, the family cat, pop out of his magician's hat (said hat was thrown out in June, when Victor shat in it), he had lectured to David on the thermodynamics of steam or read him all the begats from the Gospel According to Matthew.
Not that Hilly was an utter failure as a magician; he wasn't. In fact, HILLY BROWN'S FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW, which was held on the Browns' back lawn on the day Jim Gardener left Troy to join The New England Poetry Caravan, was considered a huge success. A dozen children - mostly Hilly's friends, but with a few of David's from nursery school thrown in for good measure - and four or five adults showed up and watched Hilly do almost a dozen tricks, give or take. Most of these tricks worked, not because of any talent or real flair, but because of the sheer determination with which Hilly had rehearsed. All the intelligence and determination in the world cannot create art without a bit of talent, but intelligence and determination can create some great forgeries.
Besides, there was this to be said for the magic set Bryant had picked up almost at random: its creators, knowing that most of the aspiring magicians into whose hands their creation would fall were apt to be clumsy and untalented, had relied mostly upon mechanical devices. You had to work to screw up the Multiplying Coins, for instance. The same went for the Magic Guillotine, a tiny model (with MADE IN TAIWAN stamped discreetly on its plastic base) loaded with a razor-blade. When a nervous member of the audience (or a perfectly blase David) put his finger into the guillotine's cradle, above a hole which held a cigarette, Hilly would slam the blade down, cut the cigarette in two ... but leave the finger miraculously whole.
Not all of the tricks depended on mechanical devices for their effect. Hilly spent hours practicing a two-handed shuffle which allowed him to 'float' a card on the bottom of the deck to the top. He actually got quite good at it, not knowing that a good float is much more useful to a card-weasel like 'Pits' Barfield than to a magician. In an audience of more than twenty, the atmosphere of living-room intimacy is lost, and even the most spectacular card-tricks usually fall flat. Hilly's audience was small enough, however, so he was able to charm them - adults as well as children - by nonchalantly peeling cards that had been stuck into the middle of the deck from the top, by causing Rosalie Skehan to find a card which she had looked at and then pushed back into the deck residing in her purse, and, of course, by making the Jacks run from the burning house, which may be the best card-trick ever invented.
There were failures, of course. Hilly without screw-ups, Bryant said that night in bed, would be like McDonald's without hamburgers. When he attempted to pour a pitcher of water into a handkerchief he had borrowed from Joe Paulson, the postman who would be electrocuted about a month later, he succeeded in doing no more than wetting both the handkerchief and the front of his pants. Victor refused to pop out of the hat. Most embarrassing, the Disappearing Coins, a trick Hilly had sweated blood to master, went wrong. He palmed the coins (actually cartwheel-sized rounds of chocolate wrapped in gold foil and marketed under the trade name Munchie Money) with no trouble, but as he was turning around, they all fell out of his sleeve, to the general hilarity and wild applause of his friends.
Still, the round of applause at the end of Hilly's show was genuine. Everyone agreed that Hilly Brown was quite a magician, 'for only ten.' Only three people disagreed with this judgment: Marie Brown, Bryant Brown, and Hilly himself.
'He still hasn't found it, has he?' Marie asked her husband that night in bed. Both of them understood that it was whatever God had for Hilly to do with the searchlight He had put in Hilly's brain.
'No,' Bryant said after a long, thinking pause. 'I don't think so. But he worked hard, didn't he? Worked like a carthorse.'
'Yes,' she said. 'I was glad to see him do it. It's good to know he can, instead of just jumping from pillar to post. But it made me a little sad, too. He worked at those tricks the way a college kid studies for his finals.'
'I know.'
Marie sighed. 'He's had his show. I suppose now he'll drop it and go on to something else. He'll find it eventually.'
5
At first it seemed that Marie was right: that Hilly's interest in magic would go the way of Hilly's interest in ant farms, moon rocks, and ventriloquism. The magic set had moved from under his bed, where it was handy in case Hilly woke up in the middle of the night with an idea, to the top of his cluttered desk. Marie recognized this as the opening scene in an old play. The denouement would come when the magic set was finally relegated to the dusty recesses of the attic.
But Hilly's mind hadn't moved on - it was nothing as simple as that. The two weeks following his magic show were periods of fairly deep depression for Hilly. This was something his parents didn't sense and never knew. David knew, but at four there was nothing he could do about it, other than to hope Hilly would cheer up.
Hilly Brown was trying to cope with the idea that, for the first time in his life, he had failed at something he really wanted to do. He had been pleased with the applause and congratulations, and he was not so self-deprecating as to mistake honest praise for politeness . . . but there was a stony part of him - the part which, under other circumstances, might have made him a great artist - which was not satisfied with honest praise. Honest praise, this stony part insisted, was what the bunglers of the world heaped on the heads of the barely competent.
In short, honest praise was not enough.
Hilly did not think all this in such adult terms, of course ... but he did think it. If his mother had known his thoughts, she would have been very angry with him for his pride ... which, her Bible taught her, went before a fall. Certainly she would have been angrier with him than she'd been the time he nearly slid into the road in front of the Webber Fuel truck, or the time he tried to give Victor a bubble bath in the toilet bowl. What do you want, Hilly? she would have cried, throwing up her hands. Dishonest praise?
Ev, who saw much, and David, who saw more, could have told her.
He wanted to make their eyes get so big they looked like they were going to fall out. He wanted to make the girls scream and the boys yell. He wanted to make everyone laugh when Victor came out of the hat with a ribbon in his tail and a chocolate coin in his mouth. He would have traded all the honest praise and genuine applause in the world for just one scream, one belly-laugh, one woman fainting dead away like the booklet says they did when Harry Houdini did his famous milk-can escape. Because honest praise means you only got good. When they scream and laugh and faint, that means you got great.
But he suspected - no, he knew - that he was never going to get great, and all the want in the world would not change that fact. It was a bitter blow. Not the failure itself so much as the knowing it couldn't be changed. It was like the end of Santa Claus, in a way.
So, while his parents believed his lapse of interest to be just another shift in the capricious spring wind that blows through most childhoods, it was, in fact, the result of Hilly's first adult conclusion: If he was never going to get great at magic, he ought to put the set away. He couldn't leave it around and just do a trick now and then as a hobby. His failure hurt too badly for that. It was a bad equation. Best to erase it and try a new one.
If adults could put aside their obsessions with such firmness, the world would undoubtedly be a better place. Robertson Davies does not say that in his Deptford Trilogy ... but he strongly hints at it.
6
It was on the 4th of July that David came into Hilly's room and saw Hilly had gotten the magic kit out again. He had a lot of the tricks spread out in front of him ... and something else, as well. Batteries. The batteries from Daddy's big radio, David thought.
'Watcha doon, Hilly?' David asked, companionably enough.
Hilly's brow darkened. He sprang to his feet and shoved David out of the room so hard that David fell to the carpet. This behavior was so unusual that David was too surprised to cry.
'Get out!' Hilly shouted. 'Can't look at new tricks! The Medici princes used to have people executed if they caught them looking at tricks that belonged to their favorite magicians!'
Having uttered this pronouncement, Hilly slammed the door in David's face. David howled for admittance, but to no avail. This unaccustomed stoniness in his harum-scarum but usually sweet-natured brother was so unusual that David went downstairs, turned on the TV, and cried himself to sleep in front of Sesame Street.
7
Hilly's interest in magic had abruptly been rekindled at about the same time the picture of Jesus had begun speaking to 'Becka Paulson.
A single powerful thought had seized his mind: if mechanical tricks like the Multiplying Coins were the best he could do, he would invent his own mechanical tricks. The best anyone had ever seen! Better than Thurston's clockwork or Blackstone's hinged mirrors! If what it took to elicit gasps and screams and belly-laughs was invention rather than manipulation, so be it.
Lately he felt very capable of inventing things.
Lately his mind seemed almost stuffed with ideas for inventions.
This was not the first time the idea of inventing had crossed his mind, but his previous ideas had been vague, powered by daydreams rather than scientific principles - rocket-ships made out of cardboard boxes, ray-guns that looked suspiciously like small tree-branches with pieces of Styrofoam packing pushed onto the barrels, things like that. He had had good ideas from time to time, ideas that were almost practical, but he had always dropped them before because he had no idea how to proceed with them - he could pound a nail straight and saw a board, but that was all.
Now, however, the methods seemed as clear as crystal.
Great tricks, he thought, wiring and bolting and screwing things together. When his mother told him, on July 8th, that she was going to Augusta to shop (she spoke in a distracted sort of way; for the last week or so Marie had had a headache, and the news that Joe and 'Becka Paulson had both been killed in a housefire had not helped it one little bit), Hilly asked her if she would stop at Radio Shack in the Capitol Mall and pick him up a couple of things. He gave her his list and the eight surviving dollars of his birthday money and asked her if she could 'kinda loan him' the rest.
Ten (10) spring-type contact points @ $. 70 ea (No. 133456 7)
Three (3) 'T' contacts (spring-type) @ $1. 00 ea (No. 1334709)
One (1) coaxial cable 'barrier' plug @ $2.40 ea (No. 19776-C)
If it hadn't been for her headache and general feeling of listlessness, Marie would have doubtless wondered what this stuff was for. She would have doubtless wondered how Hilly could have gotten his information so exactly - right down to the inventory numbers - without making a long-distance call to the Augusta Radio Shack. She might even have suspected that Hilly had finally found it.
In a terrible sense, this was exactly what had happened.
Instead, she simply agreed to pick the stuff up and 'kinda loan him' the extra four dollars or so.
By the time she and David came back from Augusta, some of these questions had occurred to her. The trip had made her feel much better; her headache had blown completely away. And David, who had been silent and introspective - not at all his usual bouncy, babbly, bubbly self - ever since Hilly had pushed him out of his room, also seemed to cheer up. He talked her ear off, and it was from David that she learned Hilly had scheduled his SECOND GALA MAGIC SHOW for the back yard nine days hence.
'He's gonna do lots of new tricks,' David said, looking glum.
'Is he?'
'Yes,' David said.
'Do you think they'll be good?'
'I don't know,' David said, thinking of the way Hilly had pushed him from the room. He was on the verge of tears, but Marie didn't notice. Ten minutes before they had passed from Albion back into Haven, and her headache was coming back ... and with it, that previous sense - now a little stronger - that her thoughts were somehow not under control the way they should be. There seemed to be too many, for one thing. For another, she couldn't even tell what a lot of them were. They were like - she thought carefully, and finally came up with it. In high school she had been in the dramatics society (she thought Hilly must get much of his love of dramatics from her), and the thoughts in her mind now were like the murmur of an audience heard through the curtain before the show started. You didn't know what they were saying, but you knew they were there.
'I don't think they'll be so hot,' David finally said. He was looking out through the window, and his eyes were suddenly prisoner's eyes, lonely and trapped. David saw Justin Hurd out in his field, chugging along on his tractor, harrowing. Harrowing even though it was already the second week of July. For a moment forty-two-year-old Justin Hurd's mind was totally open to four-year-old David Brown's, and David understood that Justin was ripping his entire garden to pieces, plowing the unripened corn back under, tearing up the pea-patch, squashing the new melons to pulp under the wheels of his tractor. Justin Hurd thought it was May. May of 1951, in fact. Justin Hurd had gone crazy.
'I don't think they'll be good at all,' David said.
8
There had been roughly twenty people at Hilly's FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW.
There were only seven at the second: his mother, his father, his grandfather, David, Barney Applegate (who was, like Hilly, ten), Mrs Crenshaw from the village (Mrs Crenshaw had dropped by in hopes of selling Marie some Avon), and Hilly himself. This drastic drop in attendance was not the only contrast with the first show.
The audience at that first one had been lively - even a little cheeky (the sarcastic applause which greeted the Munchie Money when it fell from Hilly's sleeve, for instance). The audience at the second was glum and listless, sitting like department-store mannequins on the camp chairs that Hilly and his 'assistant' (a pale and silent David) had set up. Hilly's dad, who had laughed and applauded and raised hell at the first show, interrupted Hilly's opening speech about 'the mysteries of the Orient' by saying that he couldn't spare a whole lot of time for those mysteries, if Hilly didn't mind; he had just finished mowing the lawn and weeding the garden, and he wanted a shower and a beer.
The weather had changed, too. The day Of THE FIRST GALA MAGIC SHOW had been clear and warm and green, the most gorgeous sort of late spring day northern New England can offer. This day in July was hot and sullenly humid, with hazy sun beating down from a sky the color of chrome. Mrs Crenshaw sat fanning herself with one of her own Avon catalogues and waited for this to be over. A person could faint, sitting out here in the hot sun. And that little kid up there on a stage made of orange-crates, wearing a black suit and a shoepolish moustache ... spoiled ... showing off ... Mrs Crenshaw suddenly felt like killing him.
The magic this time was much better - startling, really - but Hilly was stunned and infuriated to find he was nonetheless boring his audience to tears. He could see his father shifting around, getting ready to leave, and this made Hilly feel frantic, because he wanted to impress his father above all others.
Well what do they want? he asked himself angrily, sweating just as freely as Mrs Crenshaw under his black wool Sunday suit. I'm doing great - better than Houdini, even - but they're not screaming or laughing or gasping. Why not? What the heck's wrong?
At the center of Hilly's orange-crate stage was a small platform (another orange-crate, this one covered with a sheet). Hidden inside this was a device that Hilly had invented, using the batteries David had seen in his room and the guts of an old Texas Instruments calculator that he had stolen (with no compunction at all) from the bottom of his mother's desk in the front hall. The sheet covering the orange-crate was pooled around its edges, and concealed in one of these pools of cloth was another of Hilly's out-of-character thefts - the foot-pedal of his mother's Singer sewing machine. Hilly had connected the pedal to his gadget. He used two of the spring-connectors his mother had bought at the Radio Shack in Augusta to do it.
The device he had invented first made things disappear, then brought them back again.
Hilly found this spectacular, mind-boggling. The reaction of his audience, however, started low and went downhill from there.
'For my first trick, the Disappearing Tomato!' Hilly trumpteted. He pulled a tomato out of his box of 'magic supplies' and held it up. 'I would like a volunteer from the audience to verify this is a real tomato and not just a fake or something. You, sir! Thanks!' He pointed at his father, who just waved wearily and said, 'It's a tomato, Hilly, I can see that.'
'Okay! Now watch as the Mysteries of the Orient . . . take hold!'
Hilly stooped, put the tomato in the center of the white sheet covering the crate, and then covered it with one of his mother's silk scarves. He waved his magic wand over the circular hump in the blue scarf. 'Presto-majesto!' he yelled, and stepped surreptitiously on the concealed sewing-machine pedal. There was a brief low hum.
The hump in the scarf disappeared. The scarf itself settled flat. He removed the scarf to show them the top of the platform was bare, and then waited complacently for the gasps and shouts of amazement. What he got was applause.
Polite applause, no more.
Clearly, from Mrs Crenshaw's mind, this came: A trapdoor. Nothing to that. I can't believe I'm sitting out here in the sun, watching this spoiled brat put tomatoes through trapdoors just so I can sell a bottle of perfume to his mother. Really!
Hilly began to get mad.
'Now another Mystery of the Orient! The Return of the Disappearing Tomato!' He looked formidably at Mrs Crenshaw. 'And for those of you who're thinking anything stupid like trapdoors, well, I guess even stupid people must know that a person could make a tomato go down through a trapdoor, but he'd have a pretty hard time trying to make it come back up, wouldn't he?'
Mrs Crenshaw just sat there, bu**ocks shlomping over the edges of the lawn chair she was slowly driving into the sod, smiling pleasantly. Her thoughts had faded from Hilly's head like a bad radio signal.
He put the scarf on top of the platform again. Waved his wand. Stepped on the pedal. The blue scarf pushed up in a sphere. Hilly whipped it triumphantly off to reveal the tomato again.
'Ta-daaa!' he shouted. Now the gasps and shouts would come.
More polite applause.
Barney Applegate yawned.
Hilly could have cheerfully shot him.
Hilly had planned to work his way up from the tomato trick to his Grand Finale, and it was a good plan, as far as it went. It just didn't go far enough. In his forgivable excitement at having invented a machine that actually made things disappear (he thought he might give it to the Pentagon or something after he had gotten his picture on the cover of Newsweek as the greatest magician in history), Hilly overlooked two things. First, that no one but infants and morons at any magic show believe the tricks are real, and second, he was doing essentially the same trick over and over again. Each fresh instance differed from the last only in degree.
From the Disappearing Tomato and the Return of the Disappearing Tomato, Hilly pushed grimly on to the Disappearing Radio (his father's, considerably lighter with its eight D-cell batteries now in the guts of the gadget under the platform) and the Return of Same.
Polite applause.
The Disappearing Lawn Chair, followed by the Return of the YouGuessed-It.
His audience sat lumpishly, as if sun-stunned . . . or perhaps stunned by whatever was now in the air of Haven. If anything was oxidizing from the ship's hull and entering the atmosphere, it was surely heavy that day, which was without even a slight stir of wind.
Got to do something, Hilly thought, panicked.
He decided on the spur of the moment to skip the Disappearing Bookcase, the Disappearing Exer-Cycle (Mom's), and the Disappearing Motorcycle (Dad's, and in his dad's present mood, Hilly doubted if he would volunteer to drive it up onto the platform anyway). He would go right to the Grand Finale:
The Disappearing Little Brother.
'And now -'
'Hilly, I'm sorry, but - ' his father began.
' - for my final trick,' Hilly added quickly, and saw his father settle back reluctantly into his chair, 'I need a volunteer from the audience. C'mere, David.'
David came forward with an expression in which fear and resignation were perfectly balanced. Although he had not been precisely told, David knew what the final trick was. He knew too well.
'I don't wanna,' he said to Hilly.