Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

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  CAROL TOLD HER parents that as the ship sailed south, she and George had more and more of a good time.

  We had dinner at the Captain’s table and made some very nice friends on board. We danced almost every night and went swimming often at three a.m. They had a wonderful nurse for the kids and I would sleep sometimes all morning. I got a chance to wear all my new dresses and enjoyed every minute of our stay.

  Carol and George were such a popular couple on board that, for one of the balls, they were named honorary ship’s “stewards.” We had a good time too.

  We took a tour of the hold and the engine room which the kids thoroughly enjoyed…. The dog was very well looked after and had a reasonably comfortable journey. She was right above the kids’ playroom and would howl pitifully when she heard them. The nurse would lift Julie up and Lassie would give her big kisses.

  When the ship put in at Rio de Janeiro for a few hours, a colleague of Dad’s from the Canadian consulate met us and drove us to the top of Mount Corcovado. We viewed the giant statue of Christ the Redeemer, his arms outstretched, looking down over the city to Sugarloaf Mountain and the sea. We drove past Copacabana Beach to Ipanema for lunch. I’d never seen such huge and beautiful beaches.

  The next port of call was Santos, the port for Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, situated over thirty miles inland. Dad wanted to make a quick visit to see São Paulo, but as Mom sensibly pointed out, we were in port only for the day, so he might not get back in time. Dad went anyway. On his return, he nearly missed the boat, arriving just as the gangplank was about to be pulled away. Mom was pretty upset.

  The next morning, I noticed the water in the toilet was muddy. We’d entered the enormous delta of the Rio de la Plata, the gateway to Buenos Aires. A little later, stewards arrived in our cabins to carry out our steamer trunks.

  “The boat trip is over and we were all very sad to leave it. We had a wonderful time,” Carol wrote.

  Our life in Argentina was about to begin.

  2

  BEGINNINGS

  MY FATHER, George Edwin Bell Blackstock, married my mother, Carol Janice Gray, in Toronto on May 6, 1950. It was a Saturday in spring, the traditional season for weddings. But nothing about this one seemed traditional—least of all to the two families involved.

  George and Carol had both grown up in Toronto, but their families occupied very different social strata. The Blackstocks came from what people called Old Toronto Money. The Grays had worked hard all their lives to achieve a place in the middle class, and to make a better life for their daughter. Under normal circumstances, the two families would probably never have met. They were thrust together, for good or ill, by their children.

  I never heard my parents tell stories about their wedding, nor have I ever seen any photos of it. I can picture my mother, girlishly thin yet buxom, and very pretty, with lustrous dark hair and eyes, dressed smartly; and my father, a bit gangly, with pockmarks on the cheeks where his childhood acne had been, tall and handsome, nevertheless, in a suit and tie. But all I have to prove they were once married is a certificate with her name, its spelling botched, scrawled by the justice of the peace who performed the ceremony. It took place in Etobicoke, a western suburb of Toronto, far from where either family lived. Their mothers signed the certificate as witnesses. I’m sure Carol’s father was there as well, but I haven’t heard of anyone else attending the ceremony. George’s father had died nearly five years earlier.

  It must have been a very quiet affair indeed. No doubt Carol had dreamed of a big church wedding, complete with organ music, bridesmaids, beautiful bouquets, and herself stunning in a white satin gown. She must have been disappointed with an unromantic civil ceremony before a Justice of the Peace in some nondescript office.

  This story begins, then, as a tale of two families.

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  BY 1950, THE BLACKSTOCKS had been in Canada for six generations. They were descended from pioneers who arrived from the British Isles in the 1830s. Succeeding generations of Blackstocks became wealthy from the professions and the liquor industry—ironically, since an early forebear was a circuit-riding Methodist minister who preached temperance in the backwoods.

  My father’s great-uncle, George Tate Blackstock, was an eminent lawyer who had a town, Blackstock, Ontario, named after him. He was counsel to the Canadian Pacific Railway and a staunch ally of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. His entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography makes George Tate Blackstock sound eerily similar to Dad: “Said to have possessed a commanding physical presence in the courtroom, he was described as ‘a dark-haired, good-looking fellow, with an easy and friendly gift of conversation and an entire freedom from restraint or nervousness on social occasions.’ ” It seems Great-Uncle George’s wife divorced him in 1896 on grounds of non-support.

  Dad’s grandfather, Thomas Gibbs Blackstock, married into the wealthy Gooderham family, wedding Harriet Victoria Gooderham in 1880. The Gooderhams owned Gooderham & Worts, the largest distiller of alcoholic spirits in Canada. Thomas Gibbs Blackstock went into business with his father-in-law as a partner in the Toronto Bank, a forerunner of TD Canada Trust, now the country’s second-largest financial institution.

  Dad’s father, my grandfather George Gooderham Blackstock, was a graduate of Upper Canada College (UCC), the leading prep school in Toronto, and the Royal Military College (RMC), in Kingston, Ontario. During the First World War, he served as an officer in the Canadian Army. At twenty-four, he was promoted to lieutenant-colonel on the battlefield in France and put in command of 2,400 men. Twice mentioned in dispatches, he was awarded two of the British Commonwealth’s highest honours: the Military Cross and the Order of the British Empire.

  I never met my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, but during my childhood his memory loomed large over our family. His portrait in military uniform hung in the trophy room at Toronto’s Badminton and Racquet Club. He’d founded the club in 1924 with other members of the city’s business elite as a recreational and dining venue for their set. He was an outstanding badminton player, winning the Canadian doubles championship three times. Dad kept a framed caricature of his father lunging to swat a shuttlecock, awarded on the occasion of one of his victories.

  After the war, my grandfather married my grandmother, Bessie Bell, daughter of a socially prominent Ontario family, and went into business. He gained notoriety as a high roller on Bay Street, Toronto’s financial centre, where he apparently won and lost a fortune or two and was a senior executive with various companies, including Steep Rock Mines. The 1920s were a boom time for the mining industry and the liquor trade, mainstays of the family fortune. My grandparents lived in a big rambling country house in York Mills, just north of the city, where my father grew up. He once told me there was “a lot more money around” in those days than there was in our own house a generation later.

  According to family lore, my grandmother was a proper young woman, initiated into a fast-paced, high-spending lifestyle by her worldly husband. There were gin and tonics before dinner, cocktail parties, hired help at home, and badminton and tennis foursomes at the club. There were summer holidays at Longwood, the Blackstock family’s country home on Lake Simcoe, north of Toronto, and skiing weekends in winter.

  A couple of years after they married, my grandmother gave birth to Katherine, my Aunt Kay. It was another decade, after several miscarriages (so relatives told me), before my father came along in 1933: George Junior. There would be no more children.

  During the Depression, the family’s financial fortunes declined, though it remained well-to-do. George Senior became preoccupied with business pressures and had less and less time for his family. An early photo of my father shows a small boy with neatly combed hair holding a racquet and looking seriously into the camera. My grandfather, a middle-aged man with a
military moustache, sits beside him, staring intently at the racquet.

  When my father was ten, he was sent away to board at UCC like his father and grandfather before him. The conditions at private prep schools were spartan in contrast to the boarders’ comfortable homes. Living in a dormitory with bare floors, sagging steel-frame beds, shared baths, and wake-up bells at 6:45 A.M. was thought to build “character.”

  Saturdays were half-holidays, with classes in the mornings. On Saturday afternoons, George sometimes made the long trip home by streetcar or, if he was lucky, in the chauffeur-driven family car. His parents usually went out on Saturday evenings. His sister, Katherine, who would later become a teacher, took an interest in his schooling and helped him advance in French. At home, he’d listen to The Shadow and other favourite radio serials.

  The loneliness of my father’s childhood is apparent from a little letter he wrote to his mother at age ten, not long after arriving at UCC. I found it in his papers after he died.

  Dear Mom,

  I am writing this letter to you in the library at school. I am writing because I came home over the weekend. It was good of you to have me home instead of leaving me here. There is a parents meeting tonight I suppose you know. I hope to come home on Sunday afternoon on the streetcar. I guess I’ll have to go now.

  With love

  from

  George

  Sometimes, George had to spend the whole weekend at school. Sunday mornings were reserved for chapel—Anglican, of course—and occasionally he’d be invited to midday Sunday dinner at the home of his grandmother, the previously mentioned Harriet Victoria Gooderham Blackstock. Granny B., as she was known (Great-Granny B. to me), was a throwback to another era, a quintessential Victorian matriarch. Respected and feared, she was the link connecting dozens of descendants who otherwise would scarcely have known they were related.

  Old family photos show Great-Granny B. surrounded by the clan in front of her red-brick-and-sandstone house. It was a cavernous place, with bathtubs resting on lions’ paws and uncomfortable settees around a coal fireplace in the sitting room, the atmosphere redolent of overcooked roast beef and rigid propriety. Children were to be seen and not heard.

  My father remembered all this vividly, but I was too young to experience it myself. Born in 1855, Great-Granny B. died in 1951 at ninety-six. Years later, I’d hear my aunts and uncles lamenting that her house had been demolished and converted into a parking lot by property developers, the common enemy of Old Toronto.

  George’s childhood ended when he was twelve. On November 9, 1945, his father died from a heart attack after delivering a speech about Remembrance Day. George learned of it the next morning in the newspaper. He never told me how he felt. All I know is that his whole life changed in an instant. Suddenly fatherless, on the brink of adolescence, he was the only remaining male in his immediate family, which must have conferred a scary kind of freedom.

  George remained at UCC, his fees paid by the Blackstock family trust. It almost turned out differently. His redoubtable grandmother had cut George Sr. out of her will, apparently believing he’d already drawn too heavily on his inheritance to finance his business ventures. In the process, she’d also disinherited George Jr. and his mother and sister, who were now without the means to live as they were accustomed. (It was out of the question for his mother to go to work.) After protests from George’s mother’s side of the family, the trust was amended to provide for her financial needs.

  My father was a natural athlete. He played on UCC football, hockey, and cricket teams and excelled at squash and tennis. His studies came easily to him, and he was advanced a grade. He was drum sergeant-major of the UCC band and one of the school prefects, senior students who were the top dogs in British-style prep schools.

  By all accounts, George’s mother had difficulty coping with him. I find that easy to believe—at times, she had trouble coping with life. She seemed to come down with a headache whenever demands were made on her. When I stayed at her home, she’d lie in bed on Sunday mornings, listening to the church service on the radio rather than attending in person. Friends would arrive to take her for outings, and she’d send me to the door to say she wasn’t feeling well. On the day of the funeral of Mrs. Pike, her faithful housekeeper of many decades, my grandmother asked me to phone the Pike family to express her regrets: she was indisposed. In retrospect, I think she must have suffered from depression after losing her husband so early in life.

  George’s mother never kept him close, even during the holidays. He spent a month each summer at Camp Temagami, north of Toronto, where he learned to swim, sail, and canoe. He spent the rest of the summers at a farm run by some older cousins near Port Hope, on Lake Ontario, helping bring in the hay and sleeping in a converted chicken coop.

  I remember my father reminiscing with his cousins about the good old times they’d shared at Longwood, the summer estate on Lake Simcoe. They played badminton on the lawn, swam in the bracing waters off the rocky shore, and surreptitiously smoked cigarettes in the ice house. On rainy days, they played board games, and in the evenings they read boys’ adventure stories from the well-stocked library.

  According to relatives, my father was sixteen and working at the farm when he had a serious brush with the law. A local girl was maimed in an accident involving him at the wheel of a vehicle. The details are hazy, but apparently, after the intervention of family lawyers and members of the local establishment, the problem disappeared.

  Despite that stain, with a family background like his it was naturally assumed George Blackstock had a golden future ahead of him.

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  MY MOTHER’S FAMILY TOO was shaped by the upheavals of the First World War, the dynamism of the Roaring Twenties, the troubles of the Dirty Thirties. But economically and socially, the Grays lived in a different world. My mother’s dad, Howard Gray—Grandpa to me—grew up in a working-class Toronto neighbourhood with a father he described as an “irresponsible son of a bitch”—strong language from one of the kindest people I ever knew. Grandpa didn’t say much about his mother, except that she died when he was ten. Later, he had a stepmother and stepsisters.

  Enlisting at seventeen, Grandpa fought in France with a Canadian artillery regiment during the last three years of the war. Listening to his war stories is one of my most vivid childhood memories of him: a chum dropping dead without a word after being hit by a stray bullet, shady quartermasters selling the men’s bacon to local stores, ladies of the night in London practically tackling young soldiers on leave from the killing fields. Grandpa confided in me as a man would, as a father would.

  Back in Toronto, Grandpa worked hard to get ahead, taking a low-paying day job and studying at night to become a chartered public accountant. His family’s reputation was important to him. When his father died, he struggled to pay off the old man’s financial obligations. Grandpa considered them “debts of honour.”

  Meanwhile, he was courting Gladys Austin, my future grandmother. At first, she and Grandpa couldn’t afford to marry because of the debt repayments, but finally they’d waited long enough, and in 1928 they married. No sooner had Grandpa discharged the debts than the Depression struck, and the only work he could find was selling shoes in a department store.

  Carol, my mother, was born in 1934. Grandma was quite petite; she had a difficult pregnancy and was in labour nearly a week. Grandma and Grandpa decided to take their doctor’s advice to “make this your family,” so Carol grew up an adored only child.

  When Grandpa obtained an accounting position with Provincial Paper, a major Canadian company, it marked a turning point in the family’s fortunes. They were able to buy a small house in middle-class North Toronto. They enrolled Carol in a private girls’ day school, Moulton College, on Bloor Street near Yonge Street.

  Grandpa and Grandma Gray held liberal values for their time and place. The stain of anti
-Semitism was common in society—all too prevalent, as I can attest, among Old Toronto families—but the Grays occasionally attended synagogue with Jewish friends, and Grandma used to say she found the Hebrew service beautiful. Dad’s mother, on the other hand, once told me she hoped there were no Jewish boys at my boarding school, since “they wouldn’t feel welcome.”

  With the end of the Second World War, when Carol was eleven, the family began enjoying some well-earned pleasures. They bought a small sailboat, which they took for Sunday outings in Toronto Harbour. They rented a cottage on Lake Erie. My mother’s parents played their Benny Goodman and Guy Lombardo records when friends and neighbours dropped over. Grandma was proud of her cooking, and her kitchen was often filled with the delicious aromas of homemade soups, simmering stews, and cookies baking in the oven.

  Carol was a keen reader and borrowed mystery stories and Victorian novels from the public library. Her girlfriends were always welcome in her home. One of her closest friends, Joan Clark, who was three years older, later told me she and Carol grew close despite the age difference because they shared the same interests in books and life, suggesting Carol was mature for her age. Later, Joan would become godmother to my sister, Julie.

  Like many only children, Carol was both precocious and spoiled. Her parents bought her gifts even when it wasn’t Christmas or her birthday: a new dress, books, a necklace, a bracelet. But just as she entered her teens, the Grays had to sell their house because, once again, Grandpa was sacrificing to help out relatives. The only breadwinner in the family, he assisted his stepmother and stepsisters with their financial problems. Grandpa and Grandma rented a midtown apartment near Avenue Road and Eglinton Avenue and took Carol out of Moulton College after ninth grade, enrolling her in a public high school, North Toronto Collegiate.