(1964) the Man
“She wondered why, but instantly her memory had traced the source of worry, and she knew its answer was right.
From her earliest childhood on the modern farm outside Milwaukee, Edna Foster remembered, she had been raised—by erect parents of German origin—to believe in the virtues of constancy, steadiness, punctuality. Whenever she had given voice to a girlish dream of irregular adventure, her solemn and mustached father, an omnivorous reader of almanacs and books of useful quotations, would ...repeat verbatim the words of Someone (rarely named, Edna suspected, because her father hoped that the terse homily would seem his own). “Gott im Himmel,” her father would say to the ceiling, addressing his approving Lutheran God, “adventures, romantic adventures she wants.” Then, glowering down at Edna, he would recite the wisdom of Someone: “Adventures are an indication of inefficiency. Good explorers don’t have them.”
Her father, she guessed long after, had the approval of his God because he had so carefully anticipated and thwarted the temptations of the Lutheran devil.MoreLess
From her earliest childhood on the modern farm outside Milwaukee, Edna Foster remembered, she had been raised—by erect parents of German origin—to believe in the virtues of constancy, steadiness, punctuality. Whenever she had given voice to a girlish dream of irregular adventure, her solemn and mustached father, an omnivorous reader of almanacs and books of useful quotations, would ...repeat verbatim the words of Someone (rarely named, Edna suspected, because her father hoped that the terse homily would seem his own). “Gott im Himmel,” her father would say to the ceiling, addressing his approving Lutheran God, “adventures, romantic adventures she wants.” Then, glowering down at Edna, he would recite the wisdom of Someone: “Adventures are an indication of inefficiency. Good explorers don’t have them.”
Her father, she guessed long after, had the approval of his God because he had so carefully anticipated and thwarted the temptations of the Lutheran devil.MoreLess
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