The Tommyknockers

  At two that afternoon, Bryant Brown sat numbly in a chair beside his sleeping wife, wondering how he could tell her their only child was dead, if it became necessary to do so. At about that same time, a janitor who was in the basement to check on the laundry boilers saw an amazing sight: a small boy wearing nothing but pajama bottoms and a plaster cast on one arm strolling nonchalantly between two of the hospital's giant furnaces in his bare feet.

  "Hey!" the janitor yelled. "Hey, kid!"

  "Hi," Hilly said, coming over. His feet were black with dirt; his pajama bottoms were swatched with grease. "Boy, this is a big place! I think I'm lost."

  The janitor carried Hilly upstairs to the administration office. The Head sat Hilly down in a large wing chair (after prudently putting down a double spread of the Bangor Daily News) and sent his secretary out to fetch back a Pepsi-Cola and a bag of Reese's Pieces for the brat. Under other circumstances the Head would have gone himself, thereby impressing the boy with his grandfatherly kindness. Under other circumstances--by which I mean, the Head thought grimly to himself, with a different boy. He was afraid to leave Hilly alone.

  When the secretary came back with the candy and the soft drink, the Head sent her away again ... after Bryant Brown this time. Bryant was a strong man, but when he saw Hilly sitting in the Head's wing chair, his dirty feet swinging four inches off the rug and the papers crackling under his butt as he ate candy and drank Pepsi, he was unable to hold back his tears of relief and thanksgiving. This of course made Hilly--who never in his life had ever done anything consciously bad--also burst into tears.

  "Christ, Hilly, where you been?"

  Hilly told the story as best he could, leaving Bryant and the Head to parse objective truth out of it as best they could. He had gotten lost, wandered into the basement ("I was followin a pixie," Hilly told them), and had crawled under one of the furnaces to sleep. It had been very warm there, he told them, so warm he had taken off his pajama shirt, working it carefully over the new cast.

  "I liked the pups, too," he said. "Can we have a puppy, Daddy?"

  The janitor who had spotted Hilly also found Hilly's shirt. It was under the No. 2 furnace. Getting the shirt out, he saw the "puppies" too, although they skittered away from his light. He did not mention them to Mr. and Mrs. Brown, who looked like folks who would just fall apart if faced with one more shock. The janitor, a kindly man, thought they would do just as well not knowing that their son had spent the night with a pack of basement rats, some of which had indeed looked as large as puppies as they fled from his flashlight beam.

  2

  Asked for his perceptions of these things--and the similar (if less spectacular) incidents that occurred over the next five years of his life--Hilly would have shrugged and said, "I'm always getting in trouble, I guess." Hilly meant he was accident-prone, but no one had taught him this valuable phrase yet.

  When he was eight--two years after David was born--he brought home a note from Mrs. Underhill, his third-grade teacher, asking if Mr. and Mrs. Brown could come in for a brief conference. The Browns went, not without some trepidation. They knew that during the previous. week, Haven's third-graders had been given IQ tests. Bryant was secretly convinced that Mrs. Underhill was going to tell them Hilly had tested far below normal and would have to be put in remedial classes. Marie was convinced (and just as secretly) that Hilly was dyslexic. Neither had slept very well the night before.

  What Mrs. Underhill told them was that Hilly was completely off the scale--bluntly put, the lad was a genius. "You'll have to take him to Bangor and have him take the Wechsler Test if you want to know how high his IQ actually is," Mrs. Underhill told them. "Giving Hilly the Tompall IQ Test is like trying to determine a human's IQ by giving him an intelligence test designed for goats."

  Marie and Bryant discussed it ... and decided against pursuing the matter any further. They didn't really want to know how bright Hilly was. It was enough to know he was not disadvantaged ... and, as Marie said that night in bed, it explained so much: Hilly's restlessness, his apparent inability to sleep much more than six hours a night, his fierce interests which blew in like hurricanes, then blew out again with the same rapidity. One day when Hilly was almost nine, she had come back from the post office with baby David to find the kitchen, which had been spotless when she left only fifteen minutes before, a complete shambles. The sink was full of flour-clotted bowls. There was a puddle of melting butter on the counter. And something was cooking in the oven. Marie popped David quickly in his playpen and had pulled the oven open, expecting to be greeted by billows of smoke and the smell of burning. Instead, she found a tray of Bisquick rolls which, while misshapen, were quite tasty. They had had them for supper that night . . . but before then, Marie had paddled Hilly's bottom and sent him, wailing apologies, to his room. Then she had sat down at the kitchen table and cried until she laughed, while David--a placid, happy-go-lucky baby who was a sunny Tahiti to Hilly's Cape of Storms--sat holding the bars of the playpen, staring at her comically.

  One mark very much in Hilly's favor was his frank love for his brother. And although Marie and Bryant hesitated to let Hilly hold the new baby, or even to leave Hilly alone in the same room with David for more than, say, thirty seconds at a time, they gradually relaxed.

  "Hell, you could send Hilly and David off for two weeks campin up in the Allagash together and they'd come back fine," Ev Hillman said. "He loves that kid. And he's good with him."

  This proved to be so. Most--if not quite all--of Hilly's "in-troubles" stemmed from either an honest desire to help his parents or to better himself. They simply went wrong, that was all. But with David, who worshiped the ground on which his older brother walked, Hilly always seemed to go right....

  Until the seventeenth of July, that was, when Hilly did the trick.

  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 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 "in-troubles" 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 Dun-stable 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 up another present 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 just 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 b
oys 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 into 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 I."

  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 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! Thirty 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 Schwarz catalogue to make sure they would arrive on 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 the knack, and some people don't. Hilly didn't.

  In Davies' 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 had no more talent for magic than Hilly did. But David adored his brother, and would have sat in patient, attentive, loving silence if, instead of trying to make the Jacks run from the burning house, or 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 great 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 a 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 sweat blood to master, went wrong. He palmed the coins (actually cartwheel-size 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.

&n
bsp; "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 slid into the road in front of the Webber Oil 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?