No relation to Dr. Who (probably)

Meg wakes up the next morning thinking (and hoping) that the whole encounter with Mrs Whatsit was some sort of stress dream.

Her mother carefully turned over four slices of French toast, then said in a steady voice, “No, Meg. Don’t hope it was a dream. I don’t understand it any more than you do, but one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t have to understand things for them to be. I’m sorry I showed you I was upset. Your father and I used to have a joke about a tesseract.”

“What is a tesseract?” Meg asked.

“It’s a concept.” Mrs. Murry handed the twins the syrup. “I’ll try to explain it to you later. There isn’t time before school.”

On the one hand, Mrs. Murry shouldn’t be apologizing for letting her feelings show! But in her situation, where she’s trying so hard to keep her family together while her husband’s away on some vaguely sciencey…thing…it’s kind of understandable that she tries not to break down in front of her children.

The twins chime in to remind everyone that Charles Wallace is supposed to start school next year, but of course their mother responds that it’s still a year away, and they all have more pressing concerns.

Then, in school, Meg is annoyed because she did study, but due to her interrupted night, she completely forgot and/or was too tired to recall the imports and exports of Nicaragua, and as that’s just the sort of busywork that has next to no bearing on real life, anyway, she mutters that under her breath, then the teacher asks her to leave if she’s going to be “rude”, and Meg obliges. But then the principal calls her in at study hour and gives her the whole “you can do better if you just apply yourself/have a better attitude” shtick, then turns to the subject of her father.

“Just what was your father’s line of business?” Mr. Jenkins asked. “Some kind of scientist, wasn’t he?”

“He is a physicist.” Meg bared her teeth to reveal two ferocious lines of braces.

“Meg, don’t you think you’d make a better adjustment to life if you faced facts?”

“I do face facts,” Meg said. “They’re a lot easier to face than people, I can tell you.”

“Then why don’t you face the facts about your father?”

“You leave my father out of it!” Meg shouted.

It’s a little weird that he’s talking as if her father’s dead or something, when the popular theory is that he just ran off with another woman (and a scientist’s job isn’t usually life-threatening).

“Mr. Jenkins, you’ve met my mother, haven’t you? You can’t accuse her of not facing facts, can, you? She’s a scientist. She has doctors’ degrees in both biology and bacteriology. Her business is facts. When she tells me that my father isn’t coming home, I’ll believe it. As long as she says Father is coming home, then I’ll believe that.”

Anyhow, after school, Charles Wallace takes her off to meet Mrs Whatsit again, mainly because he wants to learn more about the tesseract, and partly because he wants to warn her about doing rash things like stealing bedsheets.

“School awful again today?” [Charles] asked after a while.

“Yes. I got sent to Mr. Jenkins. He made snide remarks about Father.”

Charles Wallace nodded sagely. “I know.”

“How do you know?”

Charles Wallace shook his head. “I can’t quite explain. You tell me, that’s all.”

“But I never say anything. You just seem to know.”

“Everything about you tells me,” Charles said.

“How about the twins?” Meg asked. “Do you know about them, too?”

“I suppose I could if I wanted to. If they needed me. But it’s sort of tiring, so I just concentrate on you and Mother.”

Meg and their mother are obviously the ones who are struggling the most in their father’s absence, but it’s still concerning that a FIVE-YEAR-OLD feels the need to do so much emotional labor for them.

“You mean you read our minds?”

Charles Wallace looked troubled. “I don’t think it’s that. It’s being able to understand a sort of language, like sometimes if I concentrate very hard I can understand the wind talking with the trees. You tell me, you see, sort of inad-inadvertently. That’s a good word, isn’t it? I got Mother to look it up in the dictionary for me this morning. I really must learn to read, except I’m afraid it will make it awfully hard for me in school next year if I already know things. I think it will be better if people go on thinking I’m not very bright. They won’t hate me quite so much.”

And this is where the characterization veers directly into “miniature adult” territory again, not even “child”, let alone “autistic child”. I might not have minded so much if someone else had suggested the idea of not learning to read as a means of fitting in (like Meg or his mother), because they’ve obviously been concerned about it. But Charles Wallace hardly ever interacts with people outside his family (certainly not in any meaningful ways), so the way the outside world would regard him should pretty much just be an abstract concept to him, and children that young just don’t comprehend abstraction.

Personally, I literally cannot remember a time before I could read. That doesn’t mean it’s universal for neurodivergent children, of course, but one thing I do know about autistic children is that if they learn one thing, you’ll be hard-pressed to stop them from learning everything about the subject. Basically, autistic children are ravenous learners (although they don’t always select topics that adults think useful). I find it hard to believe any child of that age would be moved by the logic Charles Wallace presents here. I find it absolutely unbelievable that an autistic child would. But hey, 1962.

So anyway, the dog finds a boy (who is unfamiliar to Charles but not Meg), and Charles Wallace acts his age for the first time this chapter when he asks Meg about the boy rather than asking the boy himself.

“Tell me about him, Meg,” Charles Wallace demanded.

“What would I know about him?” Meg asked. “He’s a couple of grades above me, and he’s on the basketball team.”

“Just because I’m tall.” Calvin sounded a little embarrassed.

Calvin calls Charles a “moron” (which is understandable, considering that he’s never met him in person before), and that riles Meg up, but Charles just wants to know what he’s doing there. He eventually admits that he wanted to get away from his large, chaotic family (he has ten siblings).

“Okay, old sport,” Calvin said, “I’ll tell you this much. Sometimes I get a feeling about things. You might call it a compulsion. Do you know what compulsion means?”

“Constraint. Obligation. Because one is compelled. Not a very good definition, but it’s the Concise Oxford.”

“Okay, okay,” Calvin sighed. “I must remember I’m preconditioned in my concept of your mentality.”

I was about to call L’Engle out on Charles remembering word-for-word definitions of random terms…then I realized that’s EXACTLY the sort of thing some autistic kid would fixate on, and I personally remember practically everything I set my mind to learn, so that’s actually pretty accurate. Good job!

“When I get this feeling, this compulsion, I always do what it tells me. I can’t explain where it comes from or how I get it, and it doesn’t happen very often. But I obey it. And this afternoon I had a feeling that I must come over to the haunted house. That’s all I know, kid. I’m not holding anything back. Maybe it’s because I’m supposed to meet you. You tell me.

Charles concludes that he’s alright, and even invites him home to dinner.

“Well, sure, but – what would your mother say to that?” Calvin asked.

“She’d be delighted. Mother’s all right. She’s not one of us. But she’s all right.”

“What about Meg?”

“Meg has it tough,” Charles Wallace said. “She’s not really one thing or the other.”

“What do you mean, one of us?” Meg demanded. “What do you mean I’m not one thing or the other?”

“Not now, Meg,” Charles Wallace said. “Slowly. I’ll tell you about it later.”

On the one hand, it’s good that Charles seems to have found something of a kindred spirit in Calvin, but I totally get Meg’s frustration about suddenly being locked out of a loop that she didn’t even know existed a minute ago.

So they enter the “haunted house” in which Mrs Whatsit and her friends have taken up residence.

In a dilapidated Boston rocker sat a plump little woman. She wasn’t Mrs Whatsit, so she must, Meg decided, be one of Mrs Whatsit’s two friends. She wore enormous spectacles, twice as thick and twice as large as Meg’s, and she was sewing busily, with rapid jabbing stitches, on a sheet. Several other sheets lay on the dusty floor.

Charles confronts the titular character of this chapter about the stolen sheets, and after a bit of dodging the question, she finally gives a straight answer.

The little woman sighed. The enormous glasses caught in the light again and shone like owl’s eyes. “In case we need ghosts, of course,” she said. “I should think you’d have guessed. If we have to frighten anybody away Whatsit thought we ought to do it appropriately. That’s why it’s so much fun to stay in a haunted house. But we really didn’t mean you to know about the sheets. Auf frischer Tat ertappt. German. In flagrante delicto. Latin. Caught in the act. English.“

Mrs Who’s shtick is that she frequently quotes famous people (philosophers, poets, etc. – she quotes Pascal earlier), and evidently adages like this, too (and you can bet they ran this bit into the ground in the movie). But I kinda agree with her on this one – what’s the point of living in a haunted house if you’re not going to lean into it? At any rate, they’ve proven to be mischievous old women, and I can’t help but feel like they would either get along really well with Eda or hate each other.

Charles Wallace held up his hand in a peremptory gesture. “Mrs Who, do you know this boy?”

Calvin bowed. “Good afternoon, Ma’am. I didn’t quite catch your name.”

“Mrs Who will do,” the woman said. “He wasn’t my idea, Charlsie, but I think he’s a good one.”

“Where’s Mrs Whatsit?” Charles asked.

“She’s busy. It’s getting near time, Charlsie, getting near time. Ab honesto virum bonum nihil deterret. Seneca. Nothing deters a good man from doing what is honorable. And he’s a very good man, Charlsie, darling, but right now he needs our help.”

“Who?” Meg demanded.

“And little Megsie! Lovely to meet you, sweetheart. Your father, of course. Now go home, loves. The time is not yet ripe. Don’t worry, we won’t go without you. Get plenty of food and rest. Feed Calvin up. Now, off with you! Justitiae soror fides. Latin again, of course. Faith is the sister of justice. Trust in us! Now, shoo!” And she fluttered up from her chair and pushed them out the door with surprising power.

Charles seems to have known this had to do with helping his father, but naturally, no one else would have believed him before. But the plot thickens, and Calvin takes up their offer of a meal.

“Lead on, moron,” Calvin cried gaily. “I’ve never even seen your house, and I have the funniest feeling that for the first time in my life I’m going home!”

Until next time…