Eve Schillman

Ev Hillman, Hilly Brown’s grandfather and a frequent presence in the Brown household, understands early that his grandson’s nervous energy will shape family life. His predictions about Hilly’s inexhaustible restlessness prove correct, but when the boy’s distress later coincides with the strange mental changes spreading through Haven, Ev fails to act on a crucial question about David’s whereabouts. His retreat turns affectionate familiarity into a painful lapse of judgment.

Identity and Family Role

Ev is Marie Brown’s father and Hilly’s grandfather. At sixty-three, he is described as garrulous enough to become tiresome, but his talkativeness is paired with close observation of the boy. He regularly eats dinner with the Browns after his wife’s death, averaging about five evenings out of seven. His place in the family is therefore practical as well as affectionate: he is not an occasional visitor but part of the household’s routine.

Ev’s view of Hilly begins with the child’s nervous habits. As an infant, Hilly rocked almost constantly and sucked both thumbs so fiercely that painful blisters formed and eventually hardened into calluses. Ev gave this temperament a memorable image, saying Hilly had “cat whiskers for nerves,” and predicted that he would always be on the jump. The phrase makes the boy’s restlessness sound less like a passing stage than a defining condition.

A Prediction Repeated in Family Life

The Browns learn how literally to take Ev’s forecast. At three, Hilly climbs out of his crib during a nap, wriggles through a window, and knocks over all twelve planters arranged along the driveway, stumps and all. Marie weeps; seeing her cry, Hilly begins crying too, still trying to suck both thumbs at once. He has not acted from deliberate malice: the destructive idea simply seemed good to him at the time. Bryant tells his son that he does not count the cost, a warning he will repeat before July 17, 1988.

Ev’s confidence in Hilly’s capacity to surprise the adults resurfaces when the boy is in hospital. After Hilly has spent three days at Derry Home Hospital, Bryant says over dinner that the experience will at least slow him down. Ev, eating with the family, answers with a cackling challenge. He is right: on his second night in the hospital, Hilly slips past the duty nurse and explores the building. At three in the morning he is discovered missing; searches of the pediatric ward, the floor, and then the whole hospital find nothing. The earlier prophecy thus returns not as a harmless family joke but as the premise of an alarming disappearance.

The Magic Set and David’s Disappearance

Years later, Ev is present for Hilly’s tenth birthday. Bryant, pressed for time and unable to find a suitable present in a toy store, buys a magic set almost at random. He brings it home while Ev is leading Hilly, David, and three of Hilly’s friends in an off-key chorus of “Sweet Betsy from Pike.” The gift becomes central to the crisis that follows, though it was Bryant—not Ev—who chose it.

During the second gala magic show, David cannot be found beneath Hilly’s makeshift stage. The adults begin to leave, but Ev stays behind, watching Hilly with a worried expression. When Hilly bitterly asks why he will not go away too, Ev asks where David is if he is not under the stage. The question cuts through the boy’s immediate anger and points toward the real emergency: David’s absence has not been explained.

Hilly breaks down, shouting that he hates his grandfather. Ev feels the hurt, shame, and confusion of the moment together. He is hurt by the rejection, although he recognizes that Hilly is emotionally exhausted. He feels ashamed because he has accepted the magic set as his own gift when it pleased the boy, and now believes he must accept responsibility for the tears it has caused, even though Bryant selected it. His response reveals the tenderness beneath his garrulous manner, but also how personal feeling draws his attention away from the unresolved disappearance.

Changed Judgment and Narrative Significance

Ev senses that something is wrong not only with Hilly but throughout Haven. He has begun to suspect that he is becoming senile, and during this summer he sees what appear to be lapses and failures of memory in people around him as well. Yet he cannot identify what distinguishes the broader disturbance from ordinary forgetfulness. The account underscores that his mind remains unusually intact: at this point, he is the only person at the magic show whose judgment is fully sound, while Jim Gardener is only relatively unaffected and has begun drinking heavily again by the seventeenth.

That clarity makes Ev’s decision more consequential. Instead of getting down on his creaking, arthritic knees to look beneath the stage and establish whether David is there, he retreats. He withdraws partly from the possibility that his gift has upset Hilly and partly from the confusion he cannot name, telling himself he will return when the boy has got hold of himself. His concern is real, but it does not become action when the situation most demands it.

Ev’s arc in these scenes is a reversal of his earlier certainty. He has repeatedly read Hilly’s restless nature correctly, and his warning about the boy’s ability to keep the family hopping has been borne out in both domestic mischief and hospital alarm. But in Haven’s altered summer, accurate knowledge of his grandson cannot protect him from a wider disturbance. The grandfather who sees the danger in Hilly’s question nevertheless leaves the question unanswered, making his retreat a human failure of judgment rather than a lack of affection.