Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

Of Einar’s four kids, Gene was the one without ambition who stayed close to home, the one who wanted to enjoy life, the one with a thousand friends. This was partly his nature and partly a conscious reproof of his father. Gene had been a high-school hockey star in Bemidji and then, following Pearl Harbor, to the chagrin of his antimilitarist father, an early enlister in the Army. He served two tours in the Pacific, emerging both unwounded and unpromoted past PFC, and returned to Bemidji to party with his friends and work at a garage and ignore his father’s stern injunctions to take advantage of the G.I. Bill. It wasn’t clear that he would have married Dorothy if he hadn’t made her pregnant, but once they were married he set about loving her with all the tenderness he believed his father had denied his mother.

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 un specialness, 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?”