I was fascinated by the caretakers. I went with their raggedly clothed kids when they milked the cows and hosed down the horses. I wondered why they put up with such a shabby way of life, especially when the luxury in which the owners lived, just a stone’s throw away, was so plain to see. Nevertheless, food was plentiful, and everyone ate well. They probably remembered worse from the old country.
I had a double perspective on the way of life there, which has largely disappeared now. Because I was a nine-year-old boy, I was accepted by both the patrón (the owner, or boss) and the campesinos (hired hands). And because I could communicate in both English and Spanish, I could understand what was happening in both camps. I enjoyed hanging about with the workers and their kids. It was a welcome distraction from my lingering sorrow over Mom, which was never far away.
I was out riding one day with the campesino kids when one of the girls’ horses bolted, taking off in my direction. With the girl holding on for her life, horse and rider galloped past me at full speed. She was screaming in fright as she struggled to get the animal under control. Later, I saw her back at the estancia hosing down the sweat-covered horse, which must have eventually slowed down from sheer exhaustion.
Sometimes, I’d go with one of the boys to the pigeon house literally to bag supper. The birds lived in their pigeonholes in the wall inside the Martello tower. Most would fly off when we approached, but some would remain hunkered down in the wall; they were easily captured in a bag and wound up as a savoury dinner.
The Fischers’ lead field hand had a rather bestial-looking wife. I once watched her stalk a chicken in the dirt backyard of their tiny house. Sneaking up behind the hapless bird, she grabbed it amid a frenzy of feathers and clucking, and, chicken in one hand and axe in the other, chopped off its head. She let it run around headless for a minute or two before taking it into the kitchen, where she plucked the feathers off the still-twitching carcass. Another day, I helped the campesinos with the potato harvest, digging the biggest potatoes I’ve ever seen out of the rich black soil with my hands.
The days were hot and sunny on the pampa, and we swam in the saltwater swimming pool. But it was very quiet too. In addition to missing Mom, I missed my friends back in the city. Lassie had been left there too. Fortunately, María was with us throughout our visit. Dad and Peter flew back to Buenos Aires for their jobs during the work week, but we kids and María spent over a month at the estancia.
Bibi Fischer was very nice to us. Her sister-in-law and a girlfriend came to visit and spent some time with Julie and Doug, reading them stories and playing with them. This spelled off María, whose time was mostly spent looking after my brother and sister. I was now grown up enough, or so I thought, that I didn’t need much minding.
In her letter to Granny, quoted earlier, Bibi gave her account of the situation.
I told you before how much the children missed their mother. Jeffrey was very quiet and serious, all inward. Douglas was trying to make friends with young women. We had them out at the Estancia once and Douglas formed such an attachment to the girlfriend of one of our friends that he asked if he could sleep in her room. He wanted to be near her all the time. And Julia somehow attached herself to my sister-in-law, maybe because she had 3 little girls already – she called her Mummy and only she could dress her and put her to bed. It was so moving to see how each in their way tried to find a substitute.
Bibi’s description of me as quiet and serious was accurate, and an acknowledgment that she really didn’t know what I was thinking or feeling. I avoided the other guests at the estancia, just as I’d avoided the strangers who’d been around our house. The idea of looking for a substitute for Mom certainly wasn’t on my mind. Perhaps that’s why Bibi’s account was short on my behaviour and focused on Doug and Julie.
Bibi was about to bring someone new into our world. She and Peter had introduced George and Ingrid, or so she suggested in the letter to my grandmother. Now, having in her words “brought them together,” she and Peter arranged for them to be together with us kids. As she said in the letter, “Later on we invited them all to the Estancia to see how it would work with the children.” The relationship between George and Ingrid had obviously advanced quite a lot.
So in early February, toward the end of our visit, Señorita Ingrid arrived. She was a beautiful young German woman in her twenties, with long blond hair, freckles, and a charming manner. And with her arrival, everything changed.
Señorita Ingrid seemed to take a lot of interest in us. She obviously took a lot of interest in Dad too. We all went horseback riding and played games together in the swimming pool. She helped Julie get dressed and came into our room to say good night to us. She told us about the little kids in her kindergarten class. She even brought to life the romantic history of the Argentine cowboys, the gauchos, telling us how they used boleadoras, a throwing device made of leather and stone, to ensnare ostriches on the pampas.
When I got a stomach ache from eating too much honeycomb from the apiary on the property, Ingrid took care to get me some medicine and give me a hug. She read stories to Doug and Julie. She only stayed for a week, but by the end of her visit, Señorita Ingrid had made a big impression. We soaked up all the attention she lavished on us.
Bibi wrote in her letter to Granny,
…– and this was most wonderful to see – how well everything worked out. The children liked [Ingrid] and she liked them, she knew how to talk to them and play with them and showed immense patience with Julia and Douglas.
I liked her well enough. But I had no idea how that would be used to imply something far greater. Doug and Julie couldn’t have known either. Although we didn’t understand it, we were still mourning Mom and hadn’t come to terms with losing her. Those things take time and patience. Dad didn’t have a lot of either.
Later, I’d learn that Señorita Ingrid’s family had immigrated to Argentina from Germany some fifteen years earlier, at the end of the Second World War. The details were a bit vague. Apparently, they’d migrated through Switzerland, where Ingrid’s parents left her for two years with family friends because she’d become too sick to travel. There she learned excellent French before travelling the rest of the way to South America. Much later, Ingrid told me that her parents were prominent enough in German society—the family owned a big industrial corporation—that her father had had to join the Nazi Party. How they managed to slip out of war-torn Germany, when many of the most powerful Nazis could not, is still a mystery to me. Ingrid’s mother came from French nobility by way of Neuchâtel, in Switzerland, so I was told, and perhaps her family connections provided them with safe passage. Her parents would later return to Germany in their retirement.
Because she’d lived in Buenos Aires for almost half of her life, Ingrid spoke perfect Spanish with an Argentine accent. That accent, really Italian in origin, is very pronounced and distinctive in the Spanish-speaking world. She also spoke some English with a bit of a German accent—although she was obviously not yet comfortable in writing English—and French and some Italian too. She was clearly a natural when it came to languages.
* * *
—
AT THE END of our visit to the estancia, I developed a sore throat and was taken to see a doctor in Buenos Aires. María cheerfully told me I needed to go to the British Hospital to have my tonsils taken out; they were going to do it the very next day. I’d been in that hospital recently because of the epileptic attack, and María knew it wasn’t a fun place for me. She tried to dispel my worries, saying I’d be able to eat lots of ice cream, and off to the hospital we went.
That night, I begged María to stay in my room, and she agreed. The next day, I was excited, smiling from ear to ear as the nurse wheeled me into the operating room and told me, in an English accent, to breathe into a mask like a jet pilot. I soon stopped smiling when I realized how horrible the gas smelled, then passed out. They used ether as an anesthet
ic in those days.
After the operation, I was wheeled out of the operating room with my head still spinning. When I fully came to, María was there, and to my relief she agreed to sit up all night in my room again.
* * *
—
IN BUENOS AIRES, Señorita Ingrid increasingly became part of our lives. Sometimes, she came to our house from her parents’ home, ten minutes away in San Isidro, to meet Dad after work before they went out for the evening.
One afternoon, when Señorita Ingrid came to the gate, Lassie barked at her, as usual, and Dad told me to take her to the far side of the yard.
“Who’s that?” my pal Michael McKenney asked, frowning, when he saw Ingrid talking to Dad, glamorous in a cocktail dress and heels and smoking a cigarette. With her beautiful long blond hair, Ingrid attracted attention wherever she went.
“My Dad’s new friend,” I replied quietly, sensing Michael’s discomfort.
After Dad changed his clothes, he and Señorita Ingrid went off for the evening to the Teatro Colón. She’d replaced me as his companion at the opera on Mom’s season ticket.
I wondered what Michael told his mom when he got home. I was a little worried she might disapprove and question me about this new woman in our lives. Mrs. McKenney had been very fond of Mom. Everyone had been.
One day, Señorita Ingrid came to the house to take me shopping downtown before meeting Dad after work. As a treat, she bought us hot dogs for lunch. When we met up with Dad, she told him they were “the best-tasting hot dogs ever.” They were good, I thought to myself, but to call them the best-tasting hot dogs ever was an exaggeration.
In early April 1960, Dad asked us where we’d like to spend our Easter holidays: we could go to the Fischers’ estancia or to Córdoba again with María. We all wanted to go back to the estancia. I could see María was disappointed—she’d wanted to go to Córdoba so she could see her family. When Dad announced later that Señorita Ingrid would be joining us for the holidays, it was to the general delight of us kids. Doug and Julie liked all the attention she showered on them, and I thought she was fun to have around.
At the Fischers’ place, the days were growing cooler and shorter with the onset of fall, but the romantic relationship was heating up between Dad and Ingrid. There was no mistaking the meaning of the giggling emanating from the bathroom as they washed each other’s feet after an afternoon of horseback riding.
One evening during the Easter vacation, Dad and Señorita Ingrid sat us down in the estancia’s living room. They had something important to announce: they were going to get married. Ingrid told us she loved Dad, and she loved us too.
On the drive home after saying goodbye to the Fischers—Ingrid had already left—Dad told us that he wanted us to start calling her “Mum.”
“I know you’ve been calling her Señorita Ingrid, but now that she’s going to be your mother, I want you to start calling her Mum. Do you understand?” he said intently.
Doug and I listened quietly and said, “Yes, Dad.” Seeing our obedient unanimity, Julie chimed in, “Yes, Dad.”
I was surprised Dad wanted us to call her that so soon. It felt awkward, not genuine. At least it didn’t sound exactly the same as “Mom,” as we’d always called our real mother. I wasn’t sure why this was so important to Dad, but he’d made it very clear that it was, and I knew we had to do what he told us. I don’t think Julie understood what was really going on, but at seven, Doug understood very well: Señorita Ingrid was our new mother, and that was that. Doug also knew that a spanking was just around the corner if he said anything out of line on the matter.
In my mind’s ear, I can hear Dad shouting over the phone from Buenos Aires to Granny in Toronto, “And the kids are already calling her Mum!” Though I can’t actually remember hearing him say those very words—he was much too smart to allow that to happen—it was exactly what he would do. Our calling Ingrid “Mum” gave him the trump card he needed to convince his family in Toronto of the rightness and urgency of marrying Ingrid, all for the sake of his children. I know this in my bones.
When María heard about Dad’s marriage plans, she was horrified. She took me aside on the stairway of our house and spoke to me in Spanish about it.
“Do you agree with your father and Señorita Ingrid getting married?” she asked sternly, holding me by the shoulders so I looked her in the eye. María was a big woman and had an imposing personality when she was serious about something.
“It’s all right, I guess,” I replied, feeling conflicted between María’s understandable concern and Dad’s orders.
For a domestic in Argentina, even one as indispensable as María, to question her patrón, even implicitly, to his son’s face was taking a huge risk. If it had ever got back to my father, she’d have been fired on the spot without a reference, and she and her family thrown off the property. I didn’t want any kind of conflict over this, and probably María knew that, but out of concern for us she’d still taken the risk.
On Easter weekend, Dad and we kids had dinner at Señorita Ingrid’s parents’ place in San Isidro, a big two-storey, red-brick suburban house with a large lawn. Ingrid’s father, Herr Engelhardt (a pseudonym), was a slim, greying middle-aged man, and Frau Engelhardt was as tall as Dad, who was six feet, and carried herself with an aristocratic bearing. They enjoyed petting their two dachshunds. Maids in black-and-white uniforms served the dinner.
The Engelhardts had plenty of space, so we all spent the night there. The next day was Easter Sunday. There was an Easter egg hunt in the yard for us and Ingrid’s nieces and nephews. Although we didn’t realize it, we were being introduced to the family, as they say.
* * *
—
WE NEVER RETURNED to the Fischers’ estancia, and it would be years before I saw Bibi again. But shortly after Easter, Bibi wrote the letter to George’s mother quoted earlier.
“Dear Mrs Blackstock,” she began, “It is a year ago you came to my house for lunch with Carol—only one year and so many changes! Had we ever thought that then?”
Granny’s visit to the Fischers’ house must have been one of the many social activities Carol organized during her mother-in-law’s visit. Carol couldn’t have known that by introducing her to Bibi, she would inadvertently occasion such a letter a year later.
Bibi went on to mention what needed to be acknowledged before anything else: Carol’s death.
Somehow one is not prepared that such a young beautiful girl should pass away – it makes us all reflect how happy and grateful we must be for every moment we have with our dear ones – and that the children are healthy and happy, what a joy we have been given.
After giving her version of us children missing our mother and trying “to find a substitute,” Bibi revealed that she and Peter had brought George and Ingrid together. Finally, she addressed the real purpose of her letter.
I wanted to write you this letter to tell you that as a mother and grandmother and so far away you are probably concerned and maybe a bit worried about the type of a girl George would marry and probably also think it is too soon to think of marriage.
Bibi didn’t actually mention that by the time she was writing the letter, on May 3, George and Ingrid were already engaged to be married. I wonder whether George hadn’t yet told his mother about the engagement, and this letter was supposed to smooth the way for her acceptance; or he’d already told her, and Bibi’s letter was intended to allay concerns Granny may have expressed. George remarrying so soon after Carol’s death would have been the last thing Granny expected or wanted. On her traditional scale of values, it would have been out of the question.
Bibi moved on to make her closing argument.
Therefore (since we have a hand in this) this calms any fears [since] George could not have found a sweeter and nicer girl – from so many points of view [she] is the best to fill that empty space a
nd I furthermore believe the children need a new mother the sooner the better. [Ingrid] is also the right one to help George in his job of representation and entertaining – she is capable to run a house, is intelligent and knows how to talk to people and last but maybe most important – she loves George as well as she loves the children.
Furthermore, Bibi claimed, even María was onside.
María has expressed that she would be happy to have her as patrona and she has also seen how well the children like [Ingrid] as a younger mother and María is still María to them.
That is categorically untrue. It’s not the way María told me she felt about the impending marriage. In any case, it would have been preposterous, in that place and time, for a patrón to be concerned with a servant’s opinion on such a private and personal matter. No one would have known that better than Bibi. And only George would have known about Granny’s belief, instilled in her by Carol, in María’s importance to her grandchildren.
Bibi ended on a lighter note, encouraging Granny to revisit Argentina—as unlikely as she was to do that.
It was an extraordinary letter: skilfully and artfully composed, with its not-so-hidden agenda. It was also remarkably well written (if not entirely idiomatic) for someone who wasn’t a native English speaker. However, I don’t think it was really Bibi’s letter at all. She may have written it in her own hand and signed it, but I believe the content of the message came straight from my father. There was no way Bibi would have written such a personal letter to Granny without being asked—pressed, more likely—by him.
There was no letter from George himself to his in-laws informing them of his impending marriage—at least none that we ever found in their papers. The Grays were going to have to swallow the fact of George’s new fiancée whole, without any sugar coating.
Murder in the Family Page 13
