This is a short story written by Theodore Dreiser and I read it last week from an old book I found on the bookshelf. Though I wasn’t really expecting many surprises from this story, towards the end I was still surprised by its content.

The story starts off with old Rogaum who is a German butcher with his family living in New York. He calls his children one by one to bed every day at nine. His oldest daughter Theresa however, refuses to obey her father’s bed calls thinking that it is restricting her personal freedom. She is a girl in her puberty, therefore, wishing to show her charisma to boys. Almerting, the son of a stationer and also a member of a gang club, fell to Theresa’s interest. They were together for quite a long time before Almerting starts to complain about Theresa’s curfew. But since Theresa comes from a religious family, she refused to listen to Almerting’s wheedling. However one night, Rogaum decided to show his daughter some consequences of coming home late and locked her out.

Desperate to get in and later angry at her parents, Theresa wandered off by herself and met Almerting who coaxed her into coming with him to his club room. This leads to Rogaum looking for his daughter crazily when he saw a girl attempting to suicide laying half-dead at his feet. The girl galvanizes Rogaum to look even harder afraid that the same thing might happen to her daughter. Eventually, he was notified by the police that Almerting was with Theresa.

Overall, there weren’t a lot of surprises. But what I learned from this story is the love our parents give to us. They might be mad at us for not obeying them like Rogaum. But they do it for our sake. So as children, it is probably not a good choice to imitate Theresa and get ourselves hurt in the future.

-Coreen C.