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