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