by Mary Morris
“I’m sorry,” I told the man behind the counter, who knew me since Photofax did all our film, “I can’t find my ticket. It must be in my car. It’s Winterstone.”
He poked around in his box of film that had just been processed and handed me a thick envelope, thicker than I thought it would be. Then I drove home with the trunk full of groceries and the film.
* * *
When I pulled up in front of my house, the young man who had planted himself there a few days before was back. This time he had a notebook and pen in his hand as if he were waiting for his teacher. I shook my head when I saw him, but there was something rather sweet in his thin, sandy hair, his cheerless face.
He was probably close to Ted’s age, but he looked so much like a boy as he stood there in his glasses and a red sweater, chinos and All-Star Converse monochrome sneakers. I couldn’t help feeling he was trying to make a good impression.
I gave him a dirty look as I pulled up, but he rushed over to my car. “Mrs. Winterstone, please, may I speak with you?”
I got out, threw open the trunk, and he stared at the bags of groceries. “I’ve been away for a while.” I stood back and stared at him. “What is your name?”
“I’m Bruno. Bruno Mercedes. I have a letter here that Francis Eagger wrote to my father. They carried on quite a correspondence over a number of years, yet they never met. My father, he was a minister, and he and Mr. Eagger exchanged letters about religion. You know, Mr. Eagger was a deeply religious man, as well as a nature poet.”
“No, I didn’t know that.” So why did he drink himself to death in our kitchen? I wanted to ask Bruno Mercedes. Instead, as I scooped up the film and the blanket, I said, “Bruno, would you help me carry my groceries inside?”
I may as well have been asking him to carry pieces of the cross, the Holy Grail. Bruno reached into my trunk, clasping a brown bag of raw vegetables and rice cakes, another of cereals and paper products. These were not heavy bags, but the boy shook under their weight.
He followed me like a disciple toward the house. He knew, and I knew, that I wasn’t asking him to carry these because I couldn’t carry them myself. I was asking him to do this so I could invite him inside without actually asking him to come in. I wanted to know what it would be like to have someone like Bruno Mercedes, a devotee, a believer, and a potential boarder, inside my house. Or the former house of Francis Eagger.
With a hushed silence Bruno entered the living room. I heard him sigh and then he said, as if he would fall over, “Where should I put these?”
“In the kitchen,” I said, pointing the way.
I paused in the den to toss the blanket over the chair near the hearth, then followed behind as Bruno made his way into the kitchen, where he put the bags down on the counter and then took a deep breath. “Can I see the rest of the house?”
I led him first down the narrow corridor into Jade’s room, which faced the woods. It was a simple room and she’d hardly changed a thing since she was a girl. She still had dolls on the top shelf, a collection of shells, Sierra Club calendars, flip tops that she’d been stringing together since she was about five years old. A doll collection nailed to the wall. A large mural on the opposite wall she had painted in shades of gray and brown that had something to do with U.S. intervention in Central America. Little wizards holding crystal balls sat on her desk. A stained-glass rainbow hung from a string, casting rainbows around the room.
When Bruno nodded solemnly, we moved into my room, which was small, with just a double bed and dresser, but it looked out to the sea. There were no pictures on the wall, no photos on the dresser. There weren’t even books on the bedstand. It was odd, seeing my room with a stranger standing beside me, and I thought how stoical and barren it looked, as if the person who lived here had moved away years ago.
We paused before Ted’s door and the words inscribed on it, “Clato Verato Nictoo,” which I gazed at each time I stopped by the door. Bruno paused, hesitating with me as well. He read the words carefully, then nodded. “Do you know what they mean?” I asked him.
“Not exactly,” he said, “but I know what they come from.”
“You do? What?”
“They are the instructions that needed to be repeated in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Clato Verato Nictoo is what you need to tell the robot to keep it from destroying the earth.”
“Oh, and what happens?”
Bruno shrugged. “I don’t remember, but I think no one tells this to the robot and the earth gets destroyed.”
“So this wards off destruction?” Bruno nodded as we entered Ted’s room. I hesitated to show him the room, which had a view of the mountains and was papered wall to wall—those precious stone walls that Francis Eagger had built—with James Dean, Bogart, grunge-rock groups (Loose Screw, Nervous Breakdown Number III). His father procured these posters for him—it was the one perk, as far as I could tell, that came from having Charlie as his father. On his dresser was a Kurt Cobain shrine. His bookshelves were lined with Vampires of the Masquerade books and assorted other volumes of horror. But the view into the hills was spectacular and it was not lost on Bruno.
In the living room Bruno’s hands touched the cold stone walls. He ran his fingers over the exposed wooden beams. At the bookshelf he examined the feathers, pine cones, and shells, giving me a querulous look. “I collect things,” I said. “It’s a childhood habit.”
When we completed the brief tour, Bruno followed me back into the kitchen. “Mrs. Winterstone, I can’t thank you enough. I can’t tell you what it means to me to see this view—this vista—where he wrote ‘The gods rage against me and I can do no more but hope and be humbled by what crashes below, against this fragile shore.’”
“So, Mr. Eagger was a religious man?” I said, curious now to know more about him.
“Yes, he believed, well, not in organized religion, but he believed in a certain power. The power that made this landscape.”
“I’m a realist, Mr. Mercedes. I believe that oxygen and various elements and our relation to the sun…”
Bruno Mercedes sat down in the breakfast nook and stared out to sea. “It doesn’t matter what you believe, Mrs. Winterstone. It’s what you feel. What you feel sitting right here. People spend too much time thinking about what they think. Francis Eagger invites us to feel. I like the feel of this place, just like I like the feel of walking on pine needles and looking at a great painting and hearing a piece of music I haven’t heard before or seeing a rainbow or having a friend ask me for help. It means there’s something bigger than me out there in this world. And yet I can still be a part of it. I can embrace it and it can embrace me. Do you understand what I am saying?”
I looked at this young man with thin, sandy hair and glasses, sitting in my breakfast nook. There was something slightly sad and lost about him. “Yes, I do understand.”
“This place should be a temple. A sanctuary.”
“It is my sanctuary, Mr. Mercedes.”
“Please call me Bruno.”
“Well, then, call me Tess.”
He nodded. “Mrs. Winterstone … Tess, if I could just spend a little time absorbing this place, taking this in. You see, my dissertation is on the religious inspiration in his poems and I believe that the correspondence he carried on with my father—”
“Your father knew him?”
Bruno hesitated, as if he had gone farther than he intended. “Not exactly, but my father was a minister and they wrote letters over two decades.… It is a long story, but my parents and I did not speak for many years. We had, well, a falling-out. Eagger had a similar falling-out with his parents, only his lasted a lifetime.”
“And yours?”
“In a sense Francis Eagger brought us back together. I became interested in him and then my father shared these letters with me. That was the beginning of our reconciliation.” Bruno coughed, looking away. He didn’t seem to want to tell me any of this, but had felt he had to. He sensed perhaps that it was his way into my
house. I felt badly, as if somehow I had forced him.
“Bruno, make yourself at home. I’ll just unpack the groceries, do a few things.” I watched him as he sat in the breakfast nook, staring out to sea. Then he opened the small notebook he had brought with him and began taking notes, leafing through a tattered book of the collected poems he pulled from his knapsack. I put away groceries, tossed out dead lettuce. Bruno seemed content looking at the views, touching the stone walls, so I opened the package of photographs from the reunion.
There seemed to be more pictures than I remembered taking and as I opened it, I saw why. The first picture was of the side of a building. The second of an empty room. The third of a table and chair in that room. There was a picture of a refrigerator, a stove, a toilet. Then a suitcase in the room. There was a picture of a cot, more chairs. Chinese food on the table. Plates.
Then people began appearing slowly in the pictures. First one person—a college-age girl with straight, sandy hair—sat at the table, then another. A mother appeared, a father. They were fairly ordinary-looking with brown hair, dark eyes. More people entered the frame. An older woman wore braces. A man had his hair combed across a bald spot.
These were pictures of a family I’d never seen before. Older people, younger people gathering around laughing, eating. Toasting, glasses raised. These were pictures that could matter only to those whom they concerned—and clearly they were not mine. Since I had not had my ticket when I went to get my pictures and had just given the clerk my name, I reasoned that there must be another family named Winterstone who lived in the area. And they had recorded every moment of their move into a rather shabby, not very interesting apartment.
Quickly I put the photos away. When I had to return to work, I looked at Bruno, still sitting there in the breakfast nook. “Bruno,” I said, “I have to go now, but if you would like to come here from time to time, if it will somehow help you to write your dissertation by sitting there, then please feel free.” Even as I invited him, I wondered what I was doing. What had gotten into me, letting this boy into my house?
“Oh, Mrs. Winterstone … Tess, I can’t tell you how much it helps. To experience what he experienced. To be here in his home. Listen to this unfinished poem. It is called ‘Indigenous to Growing Up’ and we only have fragments of it: ‘Beneath one dark, soft covering of pine, the hunchback tree stands, its arms sloping like old-fashioned leaves … In spring when it rained we lay beneath those branches; touching the places where it curved.’ Do you have any idea where that hunchback tree might be?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. Bruno, this is fascinating. It really is very interesting, but I’m afraid I have to go back to work.” In truth he was making me uncomfortable and I was annoyed that I had been given those photographs that belonged to someone else. I was anxious to leave. I was afraid that I’d already opened the door too much for him and that he would be here all the time.
I walked with him outside, taking a deep breath. Checking to make sure I had the keys to the seashell house because I had a couple who were very keen on seeing it, I waved good-bye to Bruno. “Come back soon,” I said, fearing he would.
“I will,” he said. “I definitely will.”
On my way to the appointment I stopped at the photo store, where I explained to the clerk what had happened. He was grateful that I had returned because, he said, the other Winterstones had been looking for their film. They were very upset, he told me, that he had given someone else their film.
Now he gave me my pictures of the reunion, none of which came out very well. I leafed through them, but most were very dark and everyone had red eyes like rabbits when you catch them in your headlights late at night. In one I saw a person who was clearly Margaret, waving from the back of the crowd.
12
For months after he stopped coming into my room, I still stayed up at night, waiting for my father to tuck me in. I’d sit up, listening for the 9:47 to go through. It was the last train I’d hear before I had to go to sleep. But even after I heard its mournful whistle disappearing in the night, it was still difficult for me to sleep.
One night when it was raining, I heard the train whistle, but I stayed awake, listening to the rain on the roof outside my window. It sounded like small animals running across the shingles. I could hear the TV on in my parents’ room and I thought of asking someone to tuck me in. Instead I lay awake, a Nancy Drew mystery open in my lap.
Then it seemed as if the storm had picked up. I heard what sounded like hail at my window. Maybe the storm had turned ugly, though I was pretty sure it couldn’t be hail because it was April and it never hailed in April, except once that I could recall, and then Illinois was declared a disaster area because the hail did so much damage, keeping my father busy with claims for the next six months.
I was drifting off with the book open, when the sound of something fiercer than hail woke me. I was past believing in monsters trying to get in, but something was being hurled against my window. Opening the window, I gazed down below. The breeze blew hard. The branches of the maples beat against the side of the house. But in fact it was pebbles, stones from our driveway that were making the sound. I could barely make out a hand waving at me in the rain. “Tess,” a voice called. “Come outside. It’s me, Margaret.”
I could just make her out down there in a wet T-shirt, hair dripping wet. “What are you doing?” I shouted, for even I knew that it was crazy for a ten-year-old girl who lived on the other side of the tracks to be at my house at this hour in bad weather.
“Come down,” she called. “Slide down the drainpipe.”
It had never occurred to me that I could do this, and now it came as a kind of revelation. My bedroom was just above the eaves to the kitchen, and in fact it wasn’t much of a drop. But I refused. “Go home,” I told her. “You’ll get sick.”
“Come down,” she called again. She was spinning in circles on the lawn, her head tilted back, drinking in the rain. I tore the jumbo rollers out of my hair and took off my pajamas and put on a pair of shorts and a T-shirt. Then I slid down the drainpipe. I was stunned at how easy it was to slip out and escape from my life. Though up until then I hadn’t felt the need to.
“Look,” she said, holding out her arms. She began to spin again, her ponytail swinging around. She was laughing, head back, mouth open, the rain pouring off her face. I spun with her. I tilted my head back in the wind and the rain and just like Margaret, I spun. It was more fun than I imagined it would be.
Then she stopped suddenly. Taking my hand, she put it on my chest so I could feel my heart throb. “Feel that,” she said. “When I was very little,” she said, “my father told me I had a time bomb in my chest. He said I had to be careful or it would explode. For years I was afraid to run.”
Weird girl. I thought that this was a funny thing for a father to tell his daughter. “Why would he tell you that?” I asked.
“Oh,” she dropped my hand, “he always told me strange things like that. You know, my real name isn’t even Blair.”
“It isn’t?” I asked, incredulous.
“No, it’s De la Concha. Margarita de la Concha. My father is Spanish. Margaret of the Shell; that’s my name. Beautiful, isn’t it?” She tossed back her head of shimmering black hair, threw her hand over her head, and gave a little “olé.” Then she laughed so that her white teeth shone. She made them clatter together like castanets. “Beautiful?”
I nodded, laughing with her, and we did a little flamenco dance in the driving rain. “Yes,” I told her, “it is a beautiful name.” And I thought it was. Certainly better than Theadora Antonia Winterstone.
We snuck onto the screened-in porch and I brought down some old beach towels that we hardly ever used so my mother wouldn’t notice if they weren’t in the linen closet. Margaret and I huddled in the towels. I suddenly felt bad that I hadn’t invited her to my birthday party but my dad said I could only have ten kids, and of course the first ten I invited were the gang, so that was that. But now I t
hought for the first time that Margaret was nice. Strange, but nice. Though I didn’t really want to, I found myself liking her.
Margaret said she was hungry so I went and got us something to eat. I tiptoed through the kitchen, carefully opening cabinets, and returned with Cokes, a bag of chips, some cookies. When I returned with the food, I found her cold, shivering, really, her teeth chattering away and her lips turning blue. So I went back inside and grabbed a blanket off my bed and my Chicago Cubs T-shirt. She wrapped herself in the blanket and dried her wet hair with one of the towels. Water flew off her head. Even in the dark her eyes were so white and black. As she peeled off her wet shirt, I saw that her breasts were small and dark. She slipped the Cubs shirt quickly over her head.
My mother hadn’t taken the plastic covers off the summer furniture yet. As we sat on top of the plastic, our bare legs stuck to the covers and made farting noises when we moved. This sent us into such paroxysms of laughter we had to stuff the towel into our mouths so that my parents didn’t hear us.
“This is a nice house,” Margaret said after a while, looking around. “We used to live in a nice house, even nicer than this.”
I was a little hurt by her saying she lived in a nicer house than we did and part of me didn’t quite believe her, but I didn’t think she’d make something up after we’d spun around in the rain and all. “Oh, really,” I said. “Where?”
“In Wisconsin. It was a big white house by a lake like the one the Schoenfields live in. My father, he’s a very successful businessman. He runs a valve factory.”
“Valves?”
“Oh, yes, you know, pipes. They regulate the flow of things.”
From science I knew that the heart had valves, but I couldn’t quite envision manufacturing them. Still, it sounded plausible that Margaret had a father who did this for a living and did it well. “Your parents are divorced?”