Jonathan Franzen - Freedom

“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 lounge 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.”