“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.” J
“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?”
“Second-hand. 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!”
“If you had gorgeous blond hair, you wouldn’t be you.”