Acts of God by Mary Morris Page B

slightly sad and lost about him. “Yes, I do understand.”
    â€œThis place should be a temple. A sanctuary.”
    â€œIt is my sanctuary, Mr. Mercedes.”
    â€œPlease call me Bruno.”
    â€œWell, 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—”
    â€œYour 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.”
    â€œAnd yours?”
    â€œIn 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.
    â€œBruno, 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?
    â€œOh, 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