That Dorothy ended up working like a dog for him anyway, and that his own son Walter ended up hating him for this, was just one of those twists of family fate. Gene at least did not insist, the way his father had, that he was superior to his wife. On the contrary, he enslaved her with his weakness—his penchant for drink in particular. The other ways in which he came to resemble Einar were similarly roundabout in origin. He was belligerently populist, defiantly proud of his unspecialness, and attracted, therefore, to the dark side of right-wing politics. He was loving and grateful to his wife, he was famed among his friends and fellow vets for his generosity and loyalty, and yet, ever more frequently as he got older, he was given to scalding eruptions of Berglundian resentment. He hated the blacks, the Indians, the well-educated, the hoity-toity, and, especially, the federal government, and he loved his freedoms (to drink, to smoke, to hole up with his buddies in an ice-fishing hut) the more intensely for their being so modest. He was ugly to Dorothy only when she suggested, with timid solicitude—for she mostly blamed Einar, not Gene, for Gene’s shortcomings—that he should drink less.
Gene’s share of Einar’s estate, though much diminished by the self-spiting terms of Einar’s sale of his business, was large enough to put him within reach of the little roadside motel he’d long believed it would be
“neat” to own and manage. The Whispering Pines, when Gene bought it, had a stove-in septic line and a serious mold problem and was already too close to the shoulder of a highway heavily trafficked by ore trucks and due to be widened soon. Behind it was a ravine full of trash and eager young birch trees, one of them growing up through a mangled grocery cart that would eventually strangle and stunt it. Gene should have known that a more cheerful motel was bound to appear on the local market, if he could only be a little patient. But poor business decisions have their own momentum. To invest wisely, he would have had to be a more ambitious kind of person, and since he wasn’t this other kind of person, he was impatient to get his error over with, to shoot his wad and begin the work of forgetting how much money he’d spent, literally forgetting it, literally remembering a sum more like the one he later told Dorothy that he’d paid. There is, after all, a kind of happiness in unhappiness, if it’s the right unhappiness. Gene no longer had to fear a big disappointment in the future, because he’d already accomplished it; he’d cleared that hurdle, he’d permanently made himself a victim of the world. He took out a crushing second mortgage to pay for a new septic system, and every subsequent disaster, large or small—a pine tree falling through the office roof, a cash-paying guest in Room 24 cleaning walleyes on the bedspread, the Vacancy sign’s neon NO burning through most of a July Fourth weekend before Dorothy noticed it and turned it off—served to confirm his understanding of the world and his own shabby place in it.
For the first few summers at the Whispering Pines, Gene’s better-off siblings brought their families in from out of state and stayed for a week or two at special family rates whose negotiation left everyone unhappy. Walter’s cousins appropriated the tannin-stained swimming pool while his uncles helped Gene apply sealant to the parking lot or shore up the property’s eroding back slope with railroad ties. Down in the malarial ravine, near the remains of the collapsed shopping cart, Walter’s sophisticated Chicago cousin Leif told informative and harrowing stories of the big-city suburbs; most memorable and worry-provoking, for Walter, was the one about an Oak Park eighth-grader who’d managed to get naked with a girl and then, unsure about what was supposed to happen next, had peed all over her legs. Because Walter’s city cousins were much more like him than his brothers were, those early summers were the happiest of his childhood. Every day brought new adventures and mishaps: hornet stings, tetanus shots, misfiring bottle rockets, ghastly cases of poison ivy, near-drownings. Late at night, when the traffic abated, the pines near the office did honestly whisper.
Soon enough, though, the other Berglund spouses put their collective foot down, and the visits ended. To Gene, this was just more evidence that his siblings looked down on him, considered themselves too fancy for his motel, and generally belonged to that privileged class of Americans which it was becoming his great pleasure to revile and reject. He singled out Walter for derision simply because Walter liked his city cousins and missed seeing them. In the hope of making Walter less like them, Gene assigned his bookish son the dirtiest and most demeaning maintenance tasks. Walter scraped paint, scrubbed stains of blood and semen out of carpeting, and used coat-hanger wire to fish masses of slime and disintegrating hair from bathtub drains. If a guest had left a toilet especially diarrhea-spattered, and if Dorothy was not around to clean it preemptively, Gene took all three of his boys in to view the mess and then, after egging Walter’s brothers into disgusted hilarity, left Walter alone to clean it. Saying: “It’s good for him.” The brothers echoing: “Yeah, it’s good for him!” And if Dorothy got wind of this and chided him, Gene sat smiling and smoking with special relish, absorbing her anger without returning it—proud, as always, of raising neither voice nor hand against her. “Aaaa, Dorothy, leave it alone,” he said. “Work’s good for him. Teach him not to get too full of himself.”
It was as if all of the hostility that Gene might have directed at his college-educated wife, but refused to allow himself for fear of being like Einar, had found a more permissible target in his middle son, who, as Dorothy herself could see, was strong enough to bear it. Dorothy took the long view of justice. In the short run, it may have been unjust for Gene to be so hard on Walter, but in the long run her son was going to be a success, whereas her husband would never amount to much. And Walter himself, by uncomplainingly doing the nasty tasks his father set him, by refusing to cry or to whine to Dorothy, showed his father that he could beat him even at his own game. Gene’s nightly late-night stumblings into furniture, his childish panics when he ran out of cigarettes, his reflexive denigration of successful people: if Walter hadn’t been perpetually occupied with hating him, he might have pitied him. And there was little that Gene feared more than being pitied.
When Walter was nine or ten, he put a handmade No Smoking sign on the door of the room he shared with his little brother, Brent, who was bothered by Gene’s cigarettes. Walter wouldn’t have done it for his own sake—would sooner have let Gene blow smoke straight into his eyes than give him the satisfaction of complaining. And Gene, for his part, didn’t feel comfortable enough with Walter to simply tear the sign down. He contented himself instead with making fun of him. “What if your little brother wants a smoke in the middle of the night? You going to force him to go outside in the cold?”
“He already breathes funny at night from too much smoke,” Walter said.
“This is the first I’ve heard of that.”
“I’m there, I hear him.”
“I’m just saying you posted the sign for the two of you, right, and what does Brent think? He shares the room with you, right?”
“He’s six years old,” Walter said.
“Gene, I think Brent might be allergic to the smoke,” Dorothy said.
“I think Walter is allergic to me.”
“We don’t want anyone having a cigarette in our room, that’s all,” Walter said. “You can smoke outside the door but not in the room itself.”
“I don’t see what difference it makes if the cigarette’s on one side of the door or the other.”
“It’s just the new rule for our room.”
“So you’re making the rules around here now, are you?”
“In our room, yes, I am,” Walter said.
Gene was on the verge of saying something angry when a tired look came over him. He shook his head and produced the crooked, refractory grin with which he’d responded to assertions of authority all his life. He may already have seen, in Brent’s allergy, the excuse he’d been looking for to attach to the motel office a “lounge” where he could smoke in peace and his friends could come and pay a little bit to drink with him. Dorothy had rightly foreseen that such a l
ounge would be the end of him.
The great relief of Walter’s childhood, besides school, had been his mother’s family. Her father was a small-town doctor, and among her siblings and aunts and uncles were university professors, a married pair of former vaudevillians, an amateur painter, two librarians, and several bachelors who probably were gay. Dorothy’s Twin Cities relatives invited Walter down for dazzling weekends of museums and music and theater; the ones still living in the Iron Range hosted sprawling summer picnics and holiday house parties. They liked to play charades and antiquated card games like canasta; they had pianos and held sing-alongs. They were all so patently harmless that even Gene relaxed around them, laughing off their tastes and politics as eccentricities, amiably pitying them for their uselessness at manly pursuits. They brought out a domesticated side of him which Walter loved but otherwise very seldom got to see, except at Christmastime, when there was candy to be made.
The candy job was too large and important to be left to Dorothy and Walter alone. Production began on the first Sunday of Advent and continued through most of December. Necromantic metalware—iron cauldrons and racks, heavy aluminum nut-processing devices—came out of deep closets. Great seasonal dunes of sugar and towers of tins appeared. Several cubic feet of unsweetened butter was melted down with milk and sugar (for chocolateless fudge) or with sugar alone (for Dorothy’s famous Christmas toffee) or was smeared by Walter onto the reserve squadron of pans and shallow casseroles that his mother, over the years, had bought at rummage sales. There was lengthy discussion of “hard balls” and “soft balls” and “cracking.” Gene, wearing an apron, stirred the cauldrons like a Viking oarsman, doing his best to keep cigarette ash out of them. He had three ancient candy thermometers whose metal casings were shaped like fraternity paddles and whose nature it was to show no increase in temperature for several hours and then, all at once and all together, to register temperatures at which fudge burned and toffee hardened like epoxy. He and Dorothy were never more a team than when working against the clock to get the nuts mixed in and the candy poured. And later the brutal job of cutting too-hard toffee: the knife blade bowing out under the tremendous pressure Gene applied, the nasty sound (less heard than felt in the bone marrow, in the nerves of the teeth) of a sharp edge dulling itself on the bottom of a metal pan, the explosions of sticky brown amber, the paternal cries of God fucking damn it, and the querulous maternal entreaties not to swear like that.
On the last weekend of Advent, when eighty or a hundred tins had been lined with waxed paper and packed with fudge and toffee and garnished with Jordan almonds, Gene and Dorothy and Walter went out giving. It took the entire weekend, often longer. Walter’s older brother, Mitch, stayed behind at the motel with Brent, who, although he later became an Air Force pilot, as a child was easily made carsick. The candy went first to Gene’s many friends in Hibbing and then, with much backtracking and dead-ending, to farther-flung friends and relatives, down through the Iron Range to Grand Rapids and beyond. It was unthinkable not to accept coffee or a cookie at every house. Between stops, Walter sat in the back seat with a book, watching a feeble window-shaped patch of sunlight hold steady on the seat and then, when a right-angle turn was finally reached, slide across the canyon of the floor and reappear, in twisted form, on the back of the front seat. Outside were the eternal paltry wood lots, the eternal snowed-over bog, the circular tin fertilizer advertisements tacked to telephone poles, the furled hawks and bold ravens. On the seat beside him was the growing pile of packages from homes already visited—Scandinavian baked goods, Finnish and Croatian delicacies, bottles of “cheer” from Gene’s unmarried friends—and the slowly dwindling pile of Berglund tins. These tins’ chief merit was that they contained the same candy that Gene and Dorothy had been giving since they were married. The candy had gradually morphed, over the years, from a treat into a reminder of treats past. It was the annual gift the poor Berglunds could still be wealthy in.
Walter was finishing his junior year in high school when Dorothy’s father died and left her the little lakeside house in which she’d spent her girlhood summers. In Walter’s mind, the house was associated with his mother’s disabilities, because it was here, as a girl, that she’d spent long months battling the arthritis that had withered her right hand and deformed her pelvis. On a low shelf by the fireplace were the sad old “toys” with which she’d once “played” for hours—a nutcracker-like device with steel springs, a five-valved wooden trumpet—to try to preserve and increase mobility in her ravaged finger joints. The Berglunds had always been too busy with the motel to stay long at the little house, but Dorothy was fond of it, had dreams of retiring there with Gene if they could ever get rid of the motel, and so did not immediately assent when Gene proposed selling it. Gene’s health was bad, the motel was mortgaged to the hilt, and whatever small curb appeal it had once possessed was now fully eroded by the harsh Hibbing winters. Though Mitch was out of school and working as an auto-body detailer and still living at home, he blew his paychecks on girls, drink, guns, fishing equipment, and his souped-up Thunderbird. Gene might have felt differently about the house if its little unnamed lake had had fish in it more worth catching than sunnies and perch, but, since it didn’t, he didn’t see the point of holding on to a vacation home they wouldn’t have time to use anyway. Dorothy, normally the paragon of resigned pragmatism, became so sad that she went to bed for several days, complaining of a headache. And Walter, who was willing to suffer himself but couldn’t stand to see her suffering, intervened.
“I can stay in the house myself and fix it up this summer, and maybe we can start renting it out,” he told his parents.
“We need you helping here,” Dorothy said.
“I’m only here for another year anyway. What are you going to do when I’m gone?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Gene said.
“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to hire somebody.”
“That’s why we need to sell the house,” Gene said.
“He’s right, Walter,” Dorothy said. “I hate to see the house go, but he’s right.”
“Well, what about Mitch, though? He could at least pay some rent, and you could hire somebody with that.”
“He’s on his own now,” Gene said.
“Mom still cooks for him and does his laundry! Why isn’t he at least paying rent?”
“That’s none of your business.”
“It’s Mom’s business! You’d rather sell Mom’s house than make Mitch grow up!”
“That’s his room, and I’m not going to throw him out of it.”
“Do you really think we could rent the house?” Dorothy said hopefully.
“We’d be cleaning it every week and doing laundry,” Gene said. “There’d be no end to it.”
“I could drive down once a week,” Dorothy said. “It wouldn’t be so bad.”
“We need the money now,” Gene said.
“And what if I do what Mitch does?” Walter said. “What if I just say no? What if I just go over to the house this summer and fix it up?”
“You’re not Jesus Christ,” Gene said. “We can get along here without you.”
“Gene, we can at least try to rent the house next summer. If it doesn’t work out, we can always sell it.”
“I’ll go there on weekends,” Walter said. “How about that? Mitch can take over for me on the weekends, can’t he?”
“If you want to try selling Mitch on that, go ahead,” Gene said.
“I’m not his parent!”
“I’ve had enough of this,” Gene said, and retreated to the lounge.
Why Gene gave Mitch a free pass was clear enough: he saw in his oldest son a nearly exact replica of himself, and he didn’t want to ride him the way he’d once been ridden by Einar. But Dorothy’s timidness with Mitch was more mysterious to Walter. Maybe she was already so worn out by her husband that she just didn’t have the strength or the heart to battle her son as well, or maybe she cou
ld already see Mitch’s failed future and wanted him to enjoy a few more years of kindness at home before the world had its tough way with him. In any case, it fell to Walter to knock on Mitch’s door, which was plastered with STP and Pennzoil stickers, and try to be a parent to his older brother.
Mitch was lying on his bed, smoking a cigarette and listening to Bachman-Turner Overdrive on the stereo he’d bought with his bodyshop earnings. The refractory way he smiled at Walter was similar to their father’s, but more sneering. “What do you want?”
“I want you to start paying rent here, or do some work around here, or else get out.”
“Since when are you the boss?”
“Dad said I should talk to you.”
“Tell him to talk to me himself.”
“Mom doesn’t want to sell the lake house, so something’s got to change.”
“That’s her problem.”
“Jesus, Mitch. You are the most selfish person I’ve ever met.”
“Yeah, right. You’re going to go away to Harvard or wherever, and I’m going to end up taking care of this place. But I’m the selfish one.”
“You are!”
“I’m trying to save up some money in case Brenda and I need it, but I’m the selfish one.”
Brenda was the very pretty girl whose parents had practically disowned her for dating Mitch. “What exactly is your great savings plan?” Walter said. “Buying yourself a lot of stuff now that you can pawn later?”
“I work hard. What am I supposed to do, never buy anything?”
“I work hard, too, and I don’t have stuff, because I don’t get paid.”
“What about that movie camera?”
“That’s on loan from school, moron. It’s not mine.”
“Well, nobody’s loaning me any stuff, because I’m not a candy-assed suck-up.”
“That still doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay rent, or at least help out on the weekend.”