The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz Read Free Book Online

paper, the rattle of the coals in the stove, the pattern of the snowflakes dropping from the ashen sky, even such little nothings distract her. There, she frowns at me, offended by my own prodigious pen scratchings.
    She practices her music but without conviction. To be sure, her talent is not so great as your Johann’s—I don’t expect ever to hear her études at the Pabst—but she used to play with profound expression. I would wish music to be a greater pleasure to her. What makes my heart weep most, however, is her poor, neglected drawing. Remember those droll cartoons? Pages of them! But she doesn’t prize her skill and hurries through the exercises her master sets for her. All slapdash, as they say here. Such a waste!
    Latin and Greek she claims are useless. Her translations come back covered in red. She proceeds tolerably with mathematics and biology but complains that they, too, can have no place in her life. She taunts me. How have I put to use my knowledge of chemistry, my studies with Professor Von Rhein? “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “You have instructed the laundress not to put too much bleach in the bedsheets and told Gustina to add more vinegar to the kartoffelsalat. That is what you’ve done with your fine education.”
    Be thankful you have only sons, Lilian. You cannot expect them to be like you. But a daughter, naturally so similar to her mother, can be a reproach in every way she is different. Of course, my liebchen is sorry when she is cruel. She throws her arms around my neck and cries. I know her hardness is only a fleeting expression of her own frustration; to absorb it is part of a mother’s role.
    The poor thing is infected with the notion that all of her education is “bourgeois trappings,” as she puts it. “I must create my own destiny!” she insists. How foolish children are to believe themselves wise!
    And now here she is, lying along her arm on the desk like a little girl. To have them little again, just for an hour or two now and then, what wouldn’t we give for it? I must wind her up to finish this composition or she will be wretched.
    In so many ways, this assessment stung, though I couldn’t deny the truth of it. I had been hateful to her. Still, I couldn’t agree that my frustration was a childish emotion I’d outgrow. For three years, I’d been exhilarated by the classes Milwaukee College had offered me. The history, the science, the philosophy, all went far past what I’d learned in high school. Here, I’d believed, were complex but satisfying ways of making sense of events and nature and ideas. I’d felt I was being given a glimpse of the world beyond me and the tools I’d need to explore it further. But now that commencement approached, I’d begun to perceive graduation more as a finish than as a beginning. I’d ingested all the material I’d been fed, but I was a goose plumped for others’ consumption. My parents, Ernst, President McAdams, Miss Dodson, and even Lucy seemed to have a definite vision of how my life should proceed.
    “But the goose will not have it!” I said aloud. And sighed. The trouble was that the goose, being a goose, had no idea what she would have.
    Still, failing history would hardly help me. In any case, I’d been brought up to finish what I’d started. I sat myself straight in my chair again, resolved to push Napoleon smartly on.
    I was fully engrossed in my essay at last when the bell rang. Absently, I capped my pen, wiped my inky fingers, and thinking of the troops pursuing the elusive Russian army and drawn inexorably toward Moscow, I wandered into the hallway and opened the door.
    “Ernst!”
    He had a cheerful, open face, neat white teeth, apple cheeks above his pale brown mustache, and gold-rimmed spectacles that fogged the moment he stepped into the warm house.
    “You’re surprised?” he asked, pulling off his gloves and pushing them into his pocket. He removed his glasses and handed them to me, and I polished them