Wind in the Door

by L'Engle, Madeleine;

  “For some reason obscure to me, you are supposed to choose between the impostors and me. It is certainly in my interests to have you pass this absurd test. Then perhaps I can keep you out of my school.”

  “And then,” said Mr. Jenkins Two, appearing beside Mr. Jenkins One, “I will have time to concentrate on present problems instead of those which ought to be past. Now, Meg, if you will just for once in your life do it my way, not yours … I understand you’re basically quite bright in mathematics. If you would simply stop approaching each problem in your life as though you were Einstein and had to solve the problems of the universe, and would deign to follow one or two basic rules, you—and I—would have a great deal less trouble.”

  This, too, was authentic Jenkins.

  The shimmer of the cherubim wavered uneasily.

  “Meg,” Mr. Jenkins Two said, “I urge you to resolve this nonsense and tell the impostors that I am Mr. Jenkins. This whole farce is wasting a great deal of time. I am Mr. Jenkins, as you have cause to know.”

  She felt Proginoskes probing wildly. “Meg, when have you been most you, the very most you?”

  She closed her eyes. She remembered the first afternoon Calvin had come to the Murrys’ . Calvin was an honor student, but he was far better with words than with numbers, and Meg had helped him with a trigonometry problem. Since trig was not taught in Meg’s grade, her easy competence was one of her first surprises for Calvin. But at the time she had not thought of surprising him. She had concentrated wholly on Calvin, on what he was doing, and she had felt wholly alive and herself.

  “How is that going to help?” she asked the cherubim.

  “Think. You didn’t know Calvin very well then, did you?”

  “No.”

  “But you loved him, didn’t you?”

  “Then? I wasn’t thinking about love. I was just thinking about trig.”

  “Well, then,” Proginoskes said, as though that explained the entire nature of love.

  “But I can’t think about trig with Mr. Jenkins. And I can’t love him.”

  “You love me.”

  “But, Progo, you’re so awful you’re lovable.”

  “So is he. And you have to Name him.”

  The third Mr. Jenkins joined the other two. “Meg. Stop panicking and listen to me.”

  The three men stood side by side, identical, grey, dour, unperceptive, overworked: unlovable.

  “Meg,” Mr. Jenkins Two said, “if you will Name me, and quickly, I will see to it that Charles Wallace gets into competent medical hands immediately.”

  “It’s hardly that easy,” Mr. Jenkins Three said. “After all, her parents—”

  “—do not know how to handle the situation, nor do they understand how serious it is,” Mr. Jenkins Two snapped.

  Mr. Jenkins Three waved this aside. “Meg, does it not seem extraordinary to you that you should be confronted with three of me?”

  There seemed to be no answer to this question.

  Mr. Jenkins One shrugged in annoyance.

  Mr. Jenkins Two said, “It is imperative that we stick to essentials at this point. Our number is peripheral.” The real Mr. Jenkins was very fond of discarding peripherals and sticking to essentials.

  Mr. Jenkins Three said, “That there is only one of me, and that I am he, is the main point.”

  Mr. Jenkins Two snorted. “Except for the small but important fact that I am he. This trial that has been brought on us is an extraordinary one. None of us—that is, you and I, Margaret—will ever be the same again. Being confronted with these two mirror visions of myself has made me see myself differently. None of us likes to see himself as he must appear to others. I understand your point of view much better than I did before. You were quite right to come to me about your little brother. He is indeed special, and I have come to the conclusion that I have made a mistake in not realizing this, and treating him accordingly.”

  “Don’t trust him,” Mr. Jenkins Three said.

  Mr. Jenkins Two swept on. “I believe that you and I had a—shall we call it a run-in?—over the imports and exports of Nicaragua, which you were supposed to learn for one of your social-studies classes. You were quite right when you insisted that it was unnecessary for you to learn the imports and exports of Nicaragua. I shall try not to make the same kind of mistake with Charles Wallace. If Charles Wallace’s interests are different from those of our usual first-grader, we will try to understand that he has been taught by an eminent physicist father. I am sorry for all the needless pain you have been caused. And I can assure you that if you Name me, Charles Wallace will find school a pleasanter place, and I have no doubt his health will improve.”

  Meg looked warily at Mr. Jenkins Two. This was, indeed, a changed Mr. Jenkins, and she did not trust the change. On the other hand, she remembered vividly the battle they had had over the imports and exports of Nicaragua.

  Mr. Jenkins Three murmured, “Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much.”

  Mr. Jenkins Two sputtered, “What’s that?” Mr. Jenkins One looked blank.

  Mr. Jenkins Three cried triumphantly, “I could have told you he would not recognize Shakespeare. He is an impostor.”

  Meg had her doubts whether or not the real Mr. Jenkins would recognize Shakespeare.

  Mr. Jenkins Two said, “Shakespeare is peripheral. If I have often been irritable in the past it is because I have been worried. Despite your unkind opinion of me, I do not like seeing any of my children unhappy.” He sniffed.

  Mr. Jenkins One looked down his nose. “If I had the cooperation of the School Board and the P.T.A. it might untie my hands so that I could accomplish something.”

  Meg looked at the three men in their identical business suits. “It’s like a game on television.”

  “It is not a game,” Mr. Jenkins Three said sharply. “The stakes are much too high.”

  Meg asked, “What happens to you—all of you—if I Name the wrong one?”

  For a moment all the atoms of air in the schoolyard seemed to shiver; it was as though a lightning bolt of nothingness had flashed across the schoolyard, ripping the fabric of the atmosphere, then closed together again. Although nothing had been visible, Meg thought of a dark and terrible vulture slashing across the sky.

  Mr. Jenkins One said, “I do not believe in the supernatural. But this entire situation is abnormal.” His rabbity nose wriggled in pink distaste.

  Then all three men swung around as the side door to the school opened, and Charles Wallace, Louise the Larger twined around his arm and shoulders, walked down the steps and across the schoolyard.

  SIX

  The Real Mr. Jenkins

  “Charles!” Meg cried.

  All three Mr. Jenkinses held up warning hands, said simultaneously, “Charles Wallace Murry, what is it now?”

  Charles Wallace looked with interest at the three men. “Hello, what’s this?”

  Mr. Jenkins One said, “What are you doing with that—that—”

  All three men were visibly fearful of Louise. There was no telling the “real” Mr. Jenkins by a variation in response to the snake. Louise reared her head, half closed her eyes, and made the strange, clacking, warning sound which Meg had heard the night before. Charles Wallace stroked her soothingly, and looked speculatively at the three men.

  “We were supposed to bring a small pet to school today, to share with the class.”

  Meg thought,—Good for you, Charles, to think of Louise the Larger. If you terrified Mr. Jenkins, that would send you up a notch in the other kids’ estimation. If there’s one thing everybody in school agrees on, it’s that Mr. Jenkins is a retarded rodent.

  Mr. Jenkins Three said severely, “You know perfectly well that small pets were meant, Charles Wallace. Turtles or tropical fish or perhaps even a hamster.”

  “Or a gerbil,” Mr. Jenkins Two added. “A gerbil would be acceptable.”

  “Why have you multiplied?” Charles Wallace asked. “I found one of you quite enough.”

&
nbsp; Louise clacked again; it was a flesh-chilling sound.

  Mr. Jenkins Three demanded, “Why aren’t you in class, Charles?”

  “Because the teacher told me to take Louise the Larger and go home. I really don’t understand why. Louise is friendly and she wouldn’t hurt anybody. Only the girls were scared of her. She lives in our stone wall by the twins’ vegetable garden.”

  Meg looked at Louise, at the hooded eyes, the wary position of the head, the warning twitching of the last few inches of her black tail. Blajeny had told them that Louise was a Teacher. Louise herself had certainly shown in the past twenty-four hours that she was more than an ordinary garden snake. Louise would know—did know, Meg was sure—the real Mr. Jenkins. Swallowing her own shyness of all snakes, she reached out towards Charles Wallace. “Let me have Louise for a little while, please, Charles.”

  But Proginoskes spoke in her mind. “No, Meg. You have to do it yourself. You can’t let Louise do it for you.”

  All right. She accepted that. But perhaps Louise could still help.

  Charles Wallace regarded his sister thoughtfully. Then he held out the arm around which Louise’s lower half was coiled. The snake slithered sinuously to Meg. Her body felt cold, and tingled with electricity. Meg tried not to flinch.

  “Mr. Jenkins,” Meg said. “Each of you. One at a time. What are you going to do about Charles Wallace and Louise? Charles Wallace can’t possibly walk home alone. It’s too far. What are you going to do about Charles Wallace and school in general?”

  Nobody volunteered an answer. All three folded their arms impassively across their chests.

  “Mr. Jenkins Three,” Meg said.

  “Are you Naming me, Meg? That’s right.”

  “I’m not Naming anybody yet. I want to know what you’re going to do.”

  “I thought I had already told you. It is a situation which I shall have to guide carefully. It was foolish of Charlie to bring a snake to school. Snakes are quite frightening to some people, you know.”

  Louise hissed slowly. Mr. Jenkins Three turned visibly paler.

  He said, “I shall have a long, quiet session with Charles Wallace’s teacher. Then I will speak to each child in the first-grade room, separately. I shall see to it that each one has an understanding of the problem. If any of them group together and try bullying, I shall use strong disciplinary methods. This school has been run in far too lax and permissive a manner. From now on, I intend to hold the reins. And now, Charles Wallace, I shall drive you home. Your sister will bring your pet.”

  Meg turned away from him. “Mr. Jenkins Two?”

  Mr. Jenkins Two detached himself by one pace from the others. “Force, that’s what that impostor is advocating. Dictatorship. I will never put up with a dictatorship. But you should not have brought the snake to school, Charlie. You should have known better. But I think I understand. You thought it would enhance your social prestige, and make you more of an equal in the eyes of your peers. There’s where happiness lies, in success with your peer group. I want all my children to be like each other, so we must help you to be more normal, even if it means that you must go to school elsewhere for a while. I understand there’s someone from another galaxy who’s interested in helping you. Perhaps that’s our answer for the time being.”

  Meg turned to Mr. Jenkins One. He gave a small, annoyed, Mr. Jenkins shrug. “I really do not foresee much change in my relationship with Charles Wallace in the future. Why interplanetary travel should be thought of as a solution to all earth’s problems I do not understand. We have sent men to the moon and to Mars and we are none the better for it. Why sending Charles Wallace a few billion light-years across space should improve him any, I fail to see. Unless, of course, it helps his physical condition, about which nobody except myself appears concerned.” He looked at his wristwatch. “How much longer does this farce continue?”

  Meg could feel sharp, painful little flickers as the cherubim thought at her. She did not want to listen.

  “It’s all a waste of time!” she cried. “Why do I have to bother with all these Mr. Jenkinses? What can it possibly have to do with Charles?”

  Louise the Larger’s breath was cool and gentle against her ear. “It doess, it doess,” the snake hissed.

  Proginoskes said, “You don’t need to know why. Just get on with it.”

  Charles Wallace spoke wearily. “Give me Louise, please, Meg. I want to go home.”

  “It’s too far for you to walk.”

  “We’ll take it slowly.”

  Mr. Jenkins Three said sharply, “I have already said I will drive you home. You may take the snake as long as it stays in the back seat.”

  Mr. Jenkins One and Two said simultaneously, “I will drive Charles Wallace. And the snake.” They shuddered slightly, not quite simultaneously, but in syncopation.

  Charles Wallace held out his arm and Louise slithered from Meg to the little boy. “Let’s go,” he said to the three men, turned away from them, and started to walk to where the faculty parked their cars. The Mr. Jenkinses followed him, walking abreast, all with the stiff, ungainly gait which was distinctively and solely Mr. Jenkins.

  “But who will he go with?” Meg asked Proginoskes.

  “The real one.”

  “But then—”

  “I think that when they turn the corner there’ll be only one of them. It gives us a small respite, at any rate.” The cherubim materialized slowly, becoming at first a shimmer, then a transparent outline, then deepening in dimensions until he moved into complete visibility as the three Mr. Jenkinses disappeared. “Don’t waste time,” he thought sharply at her. “Think. What’s the nicest thing you’ve ever heard about Mr. Jenkins?”

  “Nice? Nothing nice. Listen, maybe all of them are impostors. Maybe they won’t come back.”

  Again the sharp little pain. “That’s too easy. One of them’s real, and for some reason he’s important. Think, Meg. You must know something good about him.”

  “I don’t want to know anything good about him.”

  “Stop thinking about yourself. Think about Charles. The real Mr. Jenkins can help Charles.”

  “How?”

  “We don’t need to know how, Meg! Stop blocking me. It’s our only hope. You must let me kythe with you.” She felt him moving about within her mind, more gently now, but persistently. “You’re still blocking me.”

  “I’m trying not to—”

  “I know. Do some math problems in your head. Anything to shut out your un-love and let me in about Mr. Jenkins. Do some math for Calvin. You love Calvin. Good. Think about Calvin. Meg! Calvin’s shoes.”

  “What about them?”

  “What kind of shoes does he have on?”

  “His regular school shoes, I suppose. How would I know? I think he has only one pair of shoes, and his sneakers.”

  “What are the shoes like?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t notice. I don’t bother much about clothes.”

  “Think some more math and let me show them to you.”

  Shoes. Strong, fairly new Oxfords which Calvin wore over mismated red and purple socks, the kind of shoes Mr. O’Keefe could ill afford to buy for his family. Meg saw the shoes vividly; the image was given her by Proginoskes; she had been quite truthful when she told him that she didn’t notice clothes. Nevertheless, her mind registered all that she saw and it was there, stored, available to the kything of the cherubim. She saw with a flash of intuition that her kything was like a small child’s trying to pick out a melody on the piano with one finger, as against the harmony of a full orchestra, like the cherubic language.

  In her mind’s ear came the echo of Calvin’s voice, coming back to her from an afternoon when she had been sent—unfairly, she thought—to Mr. Jenkins’s office, and been dealt with—unfairly—there. Calvin’s voice, quiet, calming, infuriatingly reasonable. “When I started seventh grade and went over to Regional, my mother bought me some shoes from a thrift shop. They cost her a dollar, which was more than
she could spare, and they were women’s Oxfords, the kind of black laced shoes old women wear, and at least three sizes too small for me. When I saw them, I cried, and then my mother cried. And my pop beat me. So I got a saw and hacked off the heels, and cut the toes out so I could jam my feet in, and went to school. The kids knew me too well to make remarks in my presence, but I could guess what they were sniggering behind my back. After a few days Mr. Jenkins called me into his office and said he’d noticed I’d outgrown my shoes, and he just happened to have an extra pair he thought would fit me. He’d gone to a lot of trouble to make them look used, as though he hadn’t gone out and bought them for me. I make enough money in the summers now to buy my own shoes, but I’ll never forget that he gave me the first decent pair of shoes I ever had. Sure I know all the bad things about him, and they’re all true, and I’ve had my own run-ins with him, but on the whole we get along, maybe because my parents don’t make him feel inferior, and he knows he can do things for me that they can’t.”

  Meg muttered, “It’d have been a lot easier if I could have gone on hating him.”

  Now it was Proginoskes’s voice in her mind’s ear, not Calvin’s. “What would be easier?”

  “Naming him.”

  “Would it? Don’t you know more about him now?”

  “Secondhand. I’ve never known him to do anything else nice.”

  “How do you suppose he feels about you?”

  “He’s never seen me except when I’m snarly,” she admitted. She found herself almost laughing as she remembered Mr. Jenkins saying, “Margaret, you are the most contumacious child it has ever been my misfortune to have in this office,” and she had had to go home and look up “contumacious.”

  Proginoskes probed, “Do you think he’d believe anything good about you?”

  “Not likely.”

  “Would you like him to see a different Meg? The real Meg?”

  She shrugged.

  “Well, then, how would you like to be different with him?”

  Frantically, she said, “I wish I had gorgeous blond hair.”

  “You wouldn’t, not really.”

  “Of course I would!”