Freedom [229]
Einar had been the oldest of eight children, the princeling of his family on its farm in south Österland. His mother, who was perhaps not the first woman to be unsatisfied in her marriage to a Berglund, had favored her firstborn outrageously, dressing him in finer clothes than his siblings were given, feeding him the cream from the others’ milk, and excusing him from farm chores so that he could devote himself to his education and his grooming. (“The vainest man I ever met,” Dorothy said.) The maternal sun had shone on Einar for twenty years, but then, by mistake, his mother had a late baby, a son, and fell for him the way she’d once fallen for Einar; and Einar never forgave her for it. Unable to stand not being the favored one, he sailed for America on his twenty-second birthday. Once he was there, he never went back to Sweden, never saw his mother again, proudly avowed that he’d forgotten every word of his mother tongue, and delivered, at the slightest provocation, lengthy diatribes against “the stupidest, smuggest, narrow-mindedest country on earth.” He became another data point in the American experiment of self-government, an experiment statistically skewed from the outset, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along well with others.
As a young man in Minnesota, working first as a logger clear-cutting the last virgin forests and then as a digger in a road-building gang, and not making good money at either, Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminator in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself. With several of the younger brothers who’d followed him to America, he went into business as a road-building contractor. To keep busy in the frozen months, he and his brothers also founded a small town on the banks of the upper Mississippi and opened a general store. His politics may still have been radical at that point, because he extended endless credit to the Communist farmers, many of them Finnish, who were struggling to make a living beyond the grasp of East Coast capital. The store quickly became a money-loser, and Einar was at the point of selling his share in it when a former friend of his, a man named Christiansen, opened a rival store across the street. Purely out of spite (according to Dorothy), Einar operated the store for another five years, right through the Great Depression’s nadir, accumulating unpayable chits from every farmer within ten miles of town, until poor Christiansen was finally driven into bankruptcy. Einar then relocated to Bemidji, where he did good business as a road builder but ended up selling his company at a disastrously low price to an oily-mannered associate who’d pretended to have socialist sympathies.
America, for Einar, was the land of unSwedish freedom, the place of wide-open spaces where a son could still imagine he was special. But nothing disturbs the feeling of specialness like the presence of other human beings feeling identically special. Having achieved, through his native intelligence and hard labor, a degree of affluence and independence, but not nearly enough of either, he became a study in anger and disappointment. After his retirement, in the 1950s, he began sending his relatives annual Christmas letters in which he lambasted the stupidity of America’s government, the inequities of its political economy, and the fatuity of its religion—drawing, for example, in one particularly caustic Christmas greeting, a cunning parallel between the unwed madonna of Bethlehem and the “Swedish whore” Ingrid Bergman, the birth of whose own “bastard” (Isabella Rossellini)