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 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.