Free The Edge of the Earth by Christina Schwarz

that the fall of the book wouldn’t reveal my interest to anyone who might casually open it. My mother, for instance. I was angry with Oskar for exposing me to such thoughts, but I couldn’t chastise him without revealing that I’d read the poems, and I was far too embarrassed for that.
    G. Meredith turned out to be the first flake in what soon became a flurry of books that drifted into piles on the end tables and the card table and the mantel in our parlor, as Oskar began to accompany Ernst to our house in the evenings. He didn’t bother to change out of his rough work clothes, and I saw my mother more than once brush at the place where he’d sat, for fear he’d brought sawdust or worse onto our furniture. When Ernst hurried off to the Musikverein or one of his other clubs, Oskar would stay, producing from his leather satchel whatever he was currently reading, torn paper bookmarks sprouting from between the pages like the feathers of an Indian headdress. He claimed he wanted to talk over his ideas with me, and I was flattered and curious.
    “I’ve read hardly any of this,” I protested repeatedly, thumbing through Emerson and Whitman and William James, to name a few of the volumes he thrust at me.
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said, shaking his head so that his wild hair lifted like wings. “You can think, can’t you?”
    When he got going, he seemed to leap from philosophy to literature to science, making connections that I could barely follow, let alone understand. Ernst had been wrong about his wishing to be a tugboat captain—not that it wasn’t a noble profession, but Oskar had more cerebral ambitions. He wanted to improve the engines of watercraft and maybe the design of their hulls as well. Although he was wary of limiting himself. What he wanted most was to experiment and invent, “to discover something that will help the world.” It didn’t matter what.
    “I would have thought you’d have found it worthwhile to finish college, then,” I said. His attention had awakened feelings in me that frightened me a little, and I used an acid tongue to keep them at bay.
    He wouldn’t be put off. “Oh, Oberlin.” He shrugged. “I milked all I could out of it. If you want to discover something new, you have to break from these institutions. As Emerson says, a man should walk on his own feet.”
    Trying to walk on his own feet was why Oskar had lived in so many places and worked at so many jobs. And it was why, in a few months, he was going to California, an exotic land where caballeros mingled with Orientals and people weren’t afraid to strike out on their own.
    He talked of throwing off the blinders of convention. “You were magnificent, spotting that schooner. You didn’t let your mind convince you that it wasn’t there.”
    “Of course,” I admitted, “that’s really because I didn’t understand enough to know that it shouldn’t have been there.”
    “You trusted yourself. That’s the important thing.”
    He admired the Transcendentalists. They understood that Reason wasn’t the be-all and end-all; there had to be a spark as well. Inspiration, they called it. Passion, even. God was a part of everyone, Oskar explained. Who knew what a person might be capable of with that Greatness in him? Or in her, he added, his eyes seeking my own.
    Under his tutelage, I began to feel the ribbons of my small, trussed-up experience loosening. Through the force of his conviction and his spark, I saw the world, glistening and ripe, opening before me.
    ∗ ∗ ∗
    A visit to the panorama in March brought my feelings to a head, and my betrayal of Ernst at that place was particularly egregious, since he’d bought the tickets, five of them, as a treat for me and his cousin and our friends Lucy and Charles.
    “We’ll see Greece,” he said, “and then we’ll eat, and then we’ll go to my concert—I have a solo, you know.” (This was a joke on himself; he’d mentioned his solo so often in the past month