Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  The reason for this particular outburst is long forgotten—Julie had stained her blouse, lost her pink barrette, left her cupboard in a mess—but her degradation and shame are not.

  Julie thinks Doug got it even worse than she did. It’s possible. Doug could be a mischievous little devil, raiding the cookie jar, fibbing about getting his homework done, lying about losing his pencil set. But all three of us felt the fear, a fear instilled by the unsparing fury of Ingrid’s attacks with the riding crop, the belt, the coat hanger, the bamboo cane, a length of garden hose, tools deliberately chosen.

  Doug, to his credit, was as stubborn as a donkey. And since he wasn’t a gifted pupil in school, he kept getting it. Julie was going to keep getting it no matter what—and for much longer than Doug or me, because she was the youngest. And because she was a girl.

  As for me, it took only a couple of Ingrid’s beatings before I figured out my avoidance strategy: say as little as possible to her and stay as far away from her as I could.

  The beating I remember best was the time I melted lead in one of our kitchen pots. At that point we had been in the house for some time, and Ingrid had recently had her first baby. My friend Steve and I had been experimenting with chunks of lead to make weights for shot-putting. He’d been melting lead at home, and I decided to do the same. Steve took me through the process over the phone, telling me how to melt down a piece of lead pipe in a pot on our gas stove.

  The next evening, Ingrid called me up to her bedroom. Dad was away on a business trip somewhere.

  “What did you do last night, Jeffrey?”

  “I melted lead in the kitchen.”

  “And what did you use to do that?”

  “A pot.”

  As her interrogation continued, her voice became lower, more and more deliberate and restrained, and I could feel the terror rising within me.

  “And what pot was that?”

  “A milk pot, I think.”

  “The same pot that I use to boil the baby’s milk.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And you melted lead in that.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know that lead is poisonous.”

  “I guess so. I didn’t think of that.”

  The whole time, I was highly conscious of the riding crop lying on the bed beside her. She told me to turn around and proceeded to hit me furiously on the head, shoulders, back, and legs. I was then sent to bed.

  In retrospect, my little chemistry experiment in the kitchen was a dumb and possibly dangerous thing to do. Of course, I had no clue that, beyond the household safety issue, what I’d done probably resonated with a special significance for Ingrid. I was completely ignorant of the fact that my mother had died of poisoning. But it’s as if Ingrid thought I knew and was going to beat the notion out of me.

  * * *

  —

  JULIE, DOUG, AND I had arrived in New Orleans in December 1960. At the time, we had only the vaguest idea what was going on. We knew Dad had married our new mum and we had to start a whole new life in a totally strange place. That was about it.

  Our life in New Orleans began with a pervasive homesickness. Nothing was familiar. When we left Toronto, winter had set in, so it felt very odd to wake up in the morning to mild temperatures. In Buenos Aires, even after Mom had died, there had still been our house, María, our friends, Lassie. In Toronto, there had been Grandma and Grandpa. Here, there was no one, and nothing at all to make us feel at home.

  At first, we lived in the Claiborne Towers, a downtown apartment hotel about eight blocks from the French Quarter. Dad and Ingrid had already been living there for several weeks. They were on one floor, we kids and Irma on another. We’d ride the elevator up to our parents’ apartment for meals and a TV program before bed. I was disappointed when Dad and Ingrid told us we couldn’t watch my favourite program, Perry Mason, because it was for grown-ups. I enjoyed the crime stories and the drama, which offered an escape from our barren new existence. Instead, we could watch Sprechen Sie Deutsch? on public television.

  New Orleans had its charming areas, but the neighbourhood around us wasn’t one of them. It was populated by an odd mix of homeless people and men in business suits. In front of our building was Canal Street, a huge boulevard with palm trees, wrought-iron lampposts, quaint streetcars running down the median, and ugly billboards. A block or two away was a raised freeway with layered concrete ramps.

  No sooner had we arrived, it seemed, than Doug and I were whisked over to the school we were to attend. École Classique was a midtown private school on Napoleon Avenue, not far from the Garden District. It was favoured by local professional families and expatriate foreign service people. The school receptionist tested us to make sure we could read and write. In her mind, I gathered, Canada was a wasteland of ice, snow, polar bears, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, ruled over by the Queen. As far as she was concerned, we might have been illiterate—and Argentina might as well have been on another planet.

  The school was racially segregated: no “coloured” students, the polite term for African-Americans in those days. Most white people put their kids in private schools if they could afford it, especially after the public schools became racially integrated in the early 1960s. Yet I was impressed by the huge black presence in the city—about 50 percent of the population—after living in Canada and Argentina, where at that time there were few black people. I was also struck by how badly they were treated, stuck in the most menial and lowest-paid jobs: house cleaning, gardening, garbage collection.

  I was put into a fifth-grade class, as I’d been in Toronto. I felt spaced out and lost. For the first week, I kept forgetting to take my homework home with me. I was sent to detention hall for an hour after school and required to do my homework there. Ingrid and Dad had to wait outside in the car until I’d finished before we could drive home. After a few days of this, Ingrid gave me the bus fare, put me on the public bus, and told me to find my own way home—which I did. She also set a rule for Doug and me: there would be no after-school play until we finished our homework.

  After a couple of months, we left the hotel and moved into the house Dad and Ingrid had found to rent. It was a two-storey, five-bedroom villa built in the 1940s. A staircase at the front led to a covered patio with a panoramic view of Bayou St. John, just across the street. Beyond the water, there was a statue of General P.G.T. Beauregard, a native son and prominent commander in the Confederate army during the Civil War.

  The most distinctive feature of the property was a huge, moss-covered, three-hundred-year-old oak tree known as the “Traders’ Oak,” said to have been a meeting place for merchants in bygone times. Inside, the house had a spacious living room that did service as an entertaining space, a dining room, a study for Dad, a big kitchen with breakfast area, and a bedroom for Doug and me, where we had bunk beds, and our own bathroom. Ingrid and Dad’s bedroom was upstairs, containing a huge king-sized bed and his-and-hers walk-in closets. Ingrid’s was jammed full of dresses and more pairs of women’s shoes than I’ve seen in my life. There were bedrooms for Julie and, a little way into the future, the two daughters who would be born to Ingrid and Dad. An upstairs storage area the size of a bowling alley, with two desks and no air conditioning, served Doug and me as a study space. There were also maid’s quarters to the rear and another covered patio.

  The abuse that had begun in the Claiborne Towers ramped up in earnest once we had a house. It was decided we kids needed “discipline,” which Ingrid provided in spades. We soon learned this meant, above all else, obedience to her authority.

  Julie was taught to say “Yes, Mum” whenever Ingrid told her to do something. Doug was instructed to put down his toys, stand up, and look at her when she spoke to him. And, of course, the same rules applied to me. Whenever I failed to follow them, I could feel the hair on the back of my neck prickling when Ingrid lowered her voice a
nd intoned, “Jeffrey, do you want to be smacked?”

  “No, Mum. I’m sorry,” I answered, in the contrite tone she demanded.

  Ingrid put Julie into ballet school. She was gangly and awkward, Ingrid declared, and needed to learn how to be more graceful. I was set to practising the recorder. Julie and I were both hopeless at these activities and never were able to come up to Ingrid’s high standards.

  We all did learn proper manners, however. At the dinner table, you helped the ladies with their chairs and waited until they were seated before sitting down yourself. You never left a piece of bread on your side plate with bite marks in it; you broke off a bite-sized piece instead. You put your folded hands on the table but never your elbows, nor your hands in your lap. You waited until the hostess started eating before you ate. You wiped your mouth before drinking, so as not to leave a mark on your glass. You never spoke when an adult was talking, and you never interrupted. You finished what was on your plate. In that connection, we were told several times about the terrible privations in Germany during the war, and how Ingrid’s father had to slaughter their pet rabbit to feed the family. Ingrid showed us how to ring the little bell summoning the maid to clear the table and bring in dessert. You asked to be excused from the table before getting up, but only after you’d folded your napkin in the proper fashion and put it inside its ring.

  Dad got into the spirit too. “Douglas, don’t eat with your mouth open. And Jeffrey, it’s Captain Wedekind”—who was one of their friends—“not Mr. Wedekind. He was a ship’s captain. That’s his proper title. Get it right,” he said, pointing a finger at me.

  We were enlisted to help clean up the kitchen. Doug got a smack on the head if he tried to deke out of kitchen duties. Julie got a yank and a push if she got in Ingrid’s way. Ingrid said she’d learned how to stay out of the way from her mother, who had once pushed Ingrid’s face into a pot of hot soup when she’d tried to sniff it as a child. It was like something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. And so we grew adept at staying out of the way, while remaining ever vigilant for Ingrid’s instructions.

  Normally, Irma did the cooking, with us helping her clean up. Irma was a kind, submissive person, and Ingrid walked all over people like that. Irma put in long hours slaving away to please Ingrid, but she still didn’t last very long in our household.

  When Dad came home from the office, Ingrid liked to take over in the kitchen, donning an apron and striking a pose by the stove. After saying his usual “Hi, kids,” and dropping his leather billfold on the kitchen table, where we were sitting, he’d walk over to Ingrid, and for a couple of minutes they’d make out passionately in a way one would expect only in the privacy of the bedroom. Dad wanted us to see this display. I thought it was kind of gross.

  Dad was away on business trips a lot. His assigned territory covered sixteen states across the South. He’d tell us about the Neiman Marcus department store in Dallas; show us photos of the Georgia State Capitol, with the golden dome, in Atlanta; recount his visit to the military base in Alabama, where to his delight he was made an honorary colonel. He was always flying off somewhere.

  Sometimes, I’d overhear Ingrid on the phone with Dad when he was travelling. “It’s so lonely here without you, Schatzi. Please come home. Why can’t you come home?”

  Ingrid was expecting a baby. She’d become pregnant back in September 1960, the month they got married. I only became aware of it after we moved into the new house, when Dad and Ingrid announced they were having a child. No wonder she was lonely with Dad away, which was always when the hitting got worse.

  When Ingrid went out on a Saturday night during one of Dad’s absences, Doug and I snuck out of bed to watch a movie on the television in his study. When we heard the car pull into the driveway, we turned off the movie and hightailed it back to bed. Ingrid went into the study, put her hand on the set to check if it was warm, then came into our bedroom. She smacked us both and banned us from watching TV for a week.

  I still think Julie got the worst of it. It would start with verbal abuse. A guest at our house had told Julie she was big for her age—a harmless remark that Julie repeated proudly. This met with a tongue-lashing from Ingrid in front of the entire family, including Dad. Ingrid repeated sarcastically, “I’m big for my age, I’m big for my age.”

  But a lot of the abuse was physical. Ingrid would chase Julie down the hall with a belt in hand for spilling or breaking something. At age seven, Julie told me later, Ingrid put her in her closet for an afternoon as punishment for some infraction, first allowing her to recover from being winded when Ingrid tried to knee her in the stomach. Another of Ingrid’s favourite methods was to lead Julie by the ear or her hair to the site of her transgression, yell at her, then yank her by the hair back and forth.

  With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps some of Ingrid’s behaviour shouldn’t be completely surprising. She was a young, relatively inexperienced woman living in a foreign country, suddenly responsible for three young children born to another woman, and engaged in a passionate relationship with her new husband while trying to start a family of her own. Not only that: she had a sheltered, upper-class background and was living apart from her parents for the first time. Being required to adapt to life in a supposedly classless society (except where “coloured” people were concerned), where she had no status apart from her husband, must have been stressful for her.

  I suppose that little Julie, being a girl, was Ingrid’s chief reminder of her husband’s dead wife and lover. Nevertheless, Ingrid had known from the start that if she wanted George as a husband, three children came as part of the package.

  If Ingrid was trying to beat our memories of our mother out of us, the strategy backfired. Her cruelty only made me think of Mom all the more. Lying awake in my bed, once again my only refuge, I’d ask myself why Mom wasn’t there to protect us. Doug and I would plot our escape—running away to Canada to our grandparents’ place—but, of course, we never did. We were too young and knew we wouldn’t get very far.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN THE NEW baby was born, things settled down a bit. One day, Dad took us up to his and Ingrid’s bedroom to watch what he called “the miracle of breast feeding.” There was Ingrid, lying in bed with her entire freckled breast exposed, nursing the baby. We watched with our eyes popping out.

  Sometime later, Ingrid received a gift of a golden retriever puppy from Bob and Jenny Borden in Toronto. Ingrid called him Whiskey, because he was the colour of Canadian rye. She took up obedience training with Whiskey and became good at it. She took us to obedience trials in which she and Whiskey were entered, and they won many first-place trophies.

  Eventually, Ingrid became Louisiana state obedience champion. The crowd would laugh with delight when Whiskey snapped to heel with alacrity. Ingrid loved that dog. Owners would sometimes discipline a dog at the trials by smacking it with the leash. They’d be disqualified for this, and I asked Ingrid why. She told me it was because hitting the animal showed the owner had failed to teach the dog true obedience.

  For Ingrid, teaching obedience paid dividends with us as well. Before long, she had me doing the family’s grocery shopping at the A&P supermarket. This could be awkward for me. As a diplomatic family, we didn’t have to pay local sales tax, so every time I went to the A&P checkout, I had to produce our tax card and request “no tax.” Ladies in line behind me would protest that everybody else had to pay tax, so why was this kid getting away without paying? The manager would have to be called. It made a big fuss and was very embarrassing.

  My chores also included mowing the lawn and cleaning up the yard after Whiskey. Ingrid bought a scoop and showed me how to pick up the dog shit and put it into a plastic bag. After a while, she’d come out to make sure I’d done a thorough job. Ingrid was a great believer in one of my father’s favourite sayings: “A job worth doing is worth doing well.” He’d say it when he showed us how to wash his ca
r. Ingrid applied it to cleaning up dog shit.

  One Saturday morning has remained vivid in my memory. Ingrid came out to the backyard while I was cleaning up. She and Dad had slept in and had just got out of bed. For once, she didn’t seem too concerned about the dog shit. I had the scoop and bag in my hands and was all prepared to tell her that I hadn’t finished, so please not to make any judgments yet. Instead of threatening me, Ingrid had something completely different in mind.

  “Jeffrey, let me tell you something. Never let a woman trap you by getting pregnant.”

  “Okay,” I replied.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Now I know exactly: my mother. There must have been some pillow talk going on between Ingrid and Dad, in which, perhaps, she’d pressed him for answers.

  * * *

  —

  TO PEOPLE IN New Orleans, we must have looked like an ideal family: a handsome young couple with three well-behaved, well-scrubbed children, and now a new baby. We were instructed to greet Dad and Ingrid’s guests at their cars when they arrived at our house for cocktail parties, our hair combed, clothes pressed. The family Christmas cards were adorned with photos, snapped after much prodding from Dad and Ingrid, of everyone smiling, sort of. We kids didn’t smile much otherwise. If we made jokes or carried on laughing in Dad’s presence, he called us smart alecks. “The loud laugh that spoke the vacant mind,” he used to say. Dad sure knew his Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

  Julie never smiled. Dad made a joke out of her blank expression, empty of feeling. “Simper, Julie, simper,” he’d say in a sing-song tone.

  “I had never seen children so cowed,” an aunt of ours remarked later in Canada.

  Aunt Kay came for a visit. She and Ingrid got along like oil and water. From the back of our Pontiac Parisienne convertible, I heard Kay, in the passenger seat, tell Ingrid, who was driving, “I still love my children, even if they misbehave.” That was quite a rebuke coming from one’s sister-in-law, with us kids within earshot.