Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  When Granny visited, Dad and Ingrid threw a cocktail party for her. (There had been no cocktail party for Kay.) I overheard Ingrid making a pitch to her mother-in-law to support her desire for another child. Apparently, Dad wasn’t co-operating. “Well, why doesn’t he get busy?” replied Granny in an indignant tone, however contrived, to accommodate her daughter-in-law. It’s amazing what kids take in that adults think they don’t understand.

  * * *

  —

  SOMETIMES, PEOPLE WHO knew us recognized our plight, consciously or unconsciously, and helped us out in little ways. Our landlady, Mrs. Lauer, who lived next door, gave Doug a worktable and tool set.

  “Wow, Doug, are you ever lucky to have a friend like Mrs. Lauer,” Dad said. “Say thank you to Mrs. Lauer,”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Lauer,” said Doug.

  One of Doug’s teachers, Miss Federico, took a shine to him. She was a nice lady, perhaps a bit lonely, and used to take us to the sea lion pool in nearby City Park. She drove us in her late-model Cadillac down to the French Quarter, where she’d buy us ice cream while she had tea. Over the years, Doug seemed to attract the sympathies of older women who picked up on his obdurate rebellion toward his stepmother. Maybe it brought out the mother in them. It must have appeared a little strange for a teacher to be taking us on excursions on Saturday afternoons, but Ingrid didn’t seem to mind; it freed up her nap time. Grandma later thanked Miss Federico for all the attention she’d paid us, just as she’d thanked María previously.

  I found some consolation in talking to Francisca, our new live-in maid after Irma disappeared from our lives. (I didn’t know what had happened to Irma and used to wonder if Dad and Ingrid had assisted her in returning home to Argentina.) Francisca was an attractive morena from Guatemala who lived in an un-air-conditioned bedroom off the kitchen. She had a Latino boyfriend who irritated Ingrid when he picked up Francisca on her days off. He’d pull up to our house in his car and honk his horn, which Ingrid considered uncouth. I can understand how she felt.

  Francisca and I would sit in the kitchen speaking in Spanish, sharing complaints about Ingrid. She told me she was particularly offended when Ingrid gave her the dog’s bowl to eat from. It was clean, of course, but Francisca flatly rejected the insulting gesture. She worked very long hours: her day began before dawn and didn’t end until 8 P.M., after she’d finished washing up in the kitchen with our help. But the day after her day off would last even longer, because Ingrid let all the housework pile up until she came back. Ingrid considered housework beneath her. Francisca couldn’t leave her job whenever she wanted to, because Ingrid and Dad held on to her passport.

  We were also fortunate in having Daisy, our African-American babysitter. Daisy was affectionate and would talk and cuddle with us on evenings when Dad and Ingrid were out. Ingrid didn’t like that. Since Daisy was “coloured,” Ingrid told us, we shouldn’t be hugging her. “You should be proud of your own race,” she would say. “We don’t want to wind up with everybody café con leche [coffee with milk].” She even used the N-word a few times, which in those days was common practice in the Deep South.

  With that kind of influence surrounding us, I don’t know how we avoided picking up the pervasive local racism. Maybe our family situation gave us sympathy for the underdog. Maybe it was because of values we inherited from Mom and her parents.

  I told the mother of a friend that I was disturbed by the racial prejudice in New Orleans. Kids at our school threw garbage at African-American ladies walking by on the sidewalk and yelled “nig-gah” at them.

  “Why do white people treat black people that way?” I asked her. She had no answer for me. But to her credit, she was ashamed of it.

  When President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, I was twelve and in seventh grade. On the day it happened, one of the more liberal-minded teachers interrupted our class. “The President has been shot,” he announced grimly. “School is to be closed for the rest of the day. If anyone cheers, there will be consequences.” Many white people in New Orleans hated Kennedy for advancing the civil rights of African-Americans.

  By that time, it had begun to bother me when the Pledge of Allegiance was recited every morning in school. Because I wasn’t American, I was the only student in our class who didn’t have to recite it. But apart from that, I thought it was hypocritical for Americans to say they believed in “liberty and justice for all,” considering what I saw around me every day.

  (New Orleans is a very different city today, nothing like what it was then. When I went there in 2015, many mixed-race couples were strolling along Canal Street, suggesting a far more racially integrated society. The airport is named Louis Armstrong International Airport. The city had ordered the removal of Confederate monuments I used to see. The statue of General Beauregard near our house has since been taken away.)

  * * *

  —

  LIFE WITH INGRID was all about finding ways to avoid her. She terrorized us so much that when she was at home, the only peace we found was in our beds at night. It wasn’t a question of being hit for any deliberate wrongdoing. We were always in fear of being hit, at any time, for any reason.

  Fortunately, I could escape sometimes by going for sleepovers at friends’ houses. I also got some satisfaction from getting better grades in school. Driven, ironically, by the discipline instilled by Ingrid, I put in long hours slogging away in the study room. I received the help and encouragement of some sympathetic teachers and made the honour roll in sixth grade.

  One year, after school finished in early June, we drove to the beach at Dauphin Island, Alabama, for a family vacation. Dad drove us in the Parisienne with the top down. On car trips like this, he’d share some of his ideas, which have stayed with me. He didn’t agree with certain attitudes prevalent in American society, such as the obsession with handguns. “Why would anyone want to have a handgun unless they were prepared to shoot somebody?” he’d say. The prohibition against abortion was another of his sticking points: “Of course, there are circumstances where abortion is the right thing to do. How can anyone say that an early-stage fetus is a person?”

  That holiday remains in my mind as one of the rare family occasions I enjoyed. But our greatest respite from Ingrid’s tyranny came when Doug and I went to Toronto in the summers to spend long stretches of time with Mom’s parents.

  After our mother died, Grandma and Grandpa had told us, “You kids are all we have now.” They doted on us. They took us on picnics, helped us with our summer book reports, took us fishing, treated us to baseball games, taught us checkers and cribbage, and made us feel we had a home where we were wanted and we belonged.

  I told Grandma about the beatings. Horrified, she said I should call the police when I saw Julie being hit. But I never did. Who, I thought, would believe a kid?

  After a couple of years, Julie would no longer be allowed to go to Toronto with us. Dad and Ingrid kept her away from our grandparents. Instead, she went to Buenos Aires with Ingrid to visit her family, even though she wasn’t considered one of them. On those visits, Julie told me, she didn’t have to sit up straight and smile while family photos were taken: she got pulled aside and told to sit nearby.

  In New Orleans, I’d go over to my friend Steve’s place across the Mississippi River in Timberlane, a housing development with a golf course and country club. We played with Steve’s pump-action BB guns, went go-carting, hung around the pool at the country club, and did other things that twelve-year-old boys enjoy.

  During a sleepover at Steve’s, I told him about my problems with Ingrid. Steve too had a stepmother, but they seemed to have a normal enough relationship. After some emotional conversation up in Steve’s bedroom, he encouraged me to call my grandparents from the phone in his room. I took him up on it. I told Grandma and Grandpa I didn’t want to live with Ingrid anymore. They already knew about the beatings, but they were understandably alarmed. My grandmother ag
ain said I should call the police when I saw Ingrid striking Julie. But I knew the police would do nothing about it, and it would just result in more trouble from Dad for me and my grandparents. They must have felt terrible not knowing what they could do to help us. I still regret having put them through so much worry. I was desperate.

  When his parents saw their phone bill, Steve must have had to explain the reason for the expensive call to Toronto. They never mentioned it to me, and they mustn’t have mentioned it to Dad and Ingrid either, who would have punished me if they’d known.

  Later, Steve and I got into trouble when he came for a sleepover at our house. We went out after dark and roamed around the neighbourhood throwing stuff at cars. The police picked us up and delivered us to my house. Dad gave me a thrashing and grounded me for a month. Steve’s parents just grounded him.

  * * *

  —

  WITH DAD AWAY on business a lot, Ingrid was lonely with no one but kids for company. Since I was the oldest, she’d sometimes tell me things as though I were an adult and not a twelve-year-old. I had a very ambivalent, two-sided relationship with Ingrid, especially as I got older—I was still a kid to be disciplined, but also a quasi-adult when it suited her.

  She told me about a colleague of Dad’s from the South African consulate who was making sexual advances to women in their circle. Ingrid and her female foreign service acquaintances were all talking about it, and one of them said jokingly, “Maybe we should give him a try.” She also told me about a male guest at one of the cocktail parties she and Dad gave who wanted to dance cheek to cheek with her, which she permitted. The next day, he showed up at our door to tell Ingrid he knew “a place where we could go.” She sent him on his way. Dad would have been very upset about Ingrid having male friends. I once heard him tell her he expected her never to go out to dinner on her own with a man.

  Ingrid got everything she could ask for in material terms—clothes, jewellery, maid service, travel—but Dad also ordered her around sometimes. “Why don’t you do something with your hair instead of wearing it straight and long like a teenager?” he told her in front of me. The next thing we knew, Ingrid appeared in a stylish bouffant hairdo. One night, after we all arrived home late from shopping, she didn’t feel like cooking (the maid was away) and wanted to feed us a dinner of cold cuts. Dad overruled her. He said that wasn’t enough to eat for growing children, and she had to prepare something more substantial.

  Dad and Ingrid had a big row after Grandma and Grandpa sent us, as promised, the copy of the pastel portrait of our mother. At first, all we knew was that Ingrid was furious about something. Dad pursued her along the upstairs hallway into their bedroom, where she slammed the door shut behind them. We could hear their argument escalating behind the door. Ingrid was yelling, and Dad was trying to get her to keep her voice down. We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but we knew better than to hang around trouble like that.

  Later, Grandma and Grandpa phoned and asked us if we’d received Mom’s portrait. That’s how we found out about it, and how we realized Dad and Ingrid were reading our correspondence from our grandparents. Having learned the painting was on its way, they’d intercepted it without telling us. Their argument had been over what to do with it.

  When we asked them if they were opening our mail, they confirmed it without hesitation—as though it were a normal thing for parents to do. Dad told us Ingrid had wanted to give us the portrait herself, but she’d now put it away for us “for safekeeping.” Grandpa’s reaction was that the painting wasn’t hers to give. In the end, Ingrid and Dad held on to it.

  * * *

  —

  IN THE WAKE of this furore, I was surprised when Dad and Ingrid announced that Grandma and Grandpa were coming to see us in New Orleans. They made it sound like a big treat they’d arranged themselves.

  The tension between our grandparents and Dad and Ingrid was apparent to us. We knew we were not to talk about our mother—Dad and Ingrid had never come right out and said so, but we knew—yet Grandma and Grandpa were a constant reminder for them of Carol. I also knew our grandparents had been upset about my phone call telling them I didn’t want to live with Ingrid anymore. And I knew they were very worried about the mistreatment of Julie. Somehow, it seemed unlikely the visit would go well.

  But there was a lot I didn’t know. I didn’t know that Grandpa had been pressing Dad hard for information about the cause of Mom’s death, and that Dad had been putting him off, claiming ignorance, which only made Grandpa more frustrated and suspicious.

  With all these fears and anxieties gnawing at them, Grandma and Grandpa drove down from Toronto to New Orleans in their old Ford Mercury Meteor. Its high roof and metal sunshade over the windshield made it look ancient beside the newer, sleeker cars on the streets of New Orleans. This was in February 1964, just before Mardi Gras. I’d turned thirteen two months earlier. We always had school holidays on Mardi Gras so we could watch the parades on Canal Street.

  Grandma and Grandpa stayed in a motel, and at first everything seemed to be going surprisingly well. When Grandpa took me out for ice cream, he made a point of telling me he appreciated Dad’s taking him to his favourite oyster bar. Both men liked oysters on the half-shell. I learned later that Grandpa was trying to smooth things over for now, so that he and Grandma could enjoy spending time with us kids.

  But Grandpa and Dad didn’t talk just about oysters. A couple of days after the visit began, Dad and Ingrid abruptly took off for Acapulco. On their return, Ingrid told me the tension had been running so high they simply had to get out of there. Dad just told me about the magnificent view they’d enjoyed from the balcony of their hotel room, high on a hill overlooking Acapulco Bay.

  While Dad and Ingrid were away, Grandma and Grandpa took us to see the Mardi Gras parades. Crowds twenty-deep lined the route, grasping for cheap trinkets tossed from the floats by women in flamboyant costumes and headdresses. Trash lay in the streets everywhere. Sailors on leave climbed the lampposts on Bourbon Street to steal street signs as souvenirs. Returning to the parked Meteor, we passed on old drunk collapsed against a wall with a stream of urine running between his knees. Grandma turned her gaze aside. Mardi Gras was one giant, exotic piss-up.

  Things weren’t so much fun for our grandparents at the house. At first, Frau Adler, one of Ingrid’s frequent babysitters—I don’t know what happened to our beloved Daisy—helped out with the baby, our little half-sister, now two and a half. One evening, Frau Adler wasn’t there, so we and our grandparents collectively fed the baby. She had quite a set of lungs, which she put to maximum use when she wanted her favourite security blanket at bedtime. Grandma left the house that evening leaning heavily on Grandpa’s arm, her nerves completely frayed.

  From that point on, the visit was a disaster. Poor Grandma became very ill and finally had to be flown back to Toronto. She was suffering from severe nervous exhaustion over seeing first-hand how difficult and unhappy our home life had become. Her stress was compounded by the frustration of being unable to do much about it. I’m sure Dad would have said Grandma was “acting out,” one of his favourite put-downs.

  In the wake of our grandparents’ sadly shortened visit, Dad sat down to talk with us. Ingrid had departed with her daughter to visit her parents in Buenos Aires. Either he’d finally seen how miserable we were or he’d got the message from his own family, maybe from Aunt Kay, that things were just not right. One way or another, he seemed to understand we deserved a hearing.

  The three of us were sullen as we sat on the couch in Dad’s study.

  “I guess you kids think Mum is pretty strict,” he said.

  “Yes, we do,” I said, speaking for all of us.

  “Why do I get smacked every time I open my mouth?” Doug blurted out, wiping away a tear.

  “We want you to protect us, Daddy,” Julie pleaded—then she too broke into tears.

  Dad was taken aba
ck by this spontaneous barrage from his normally submissive children. Briefly at a loss, he paused for a minute so we could calm down and he could regroup.

  “All right, I know it’s been an adjustment for you—a new mother, moving to a new country, starting at a new school. But it’s been difficult for her too, you know, taking on you three kids as your new mum. I think she’s done a pretty good job. A bit of discipline is good for kids, especially with all the confusion of starting out in a new place. We needed to make sure there was order in your lives, that you got your homework done, learned to do your chores, settled into a routine. And darn it, you have. When I see all of you with Mum, I see real love between you and her. And let me tell you, that gives me a lot of satisfaction. Now run along and get ready for bed, I’ll be right there to say good night.”

  Dad sounded pleased with himself, satisfied he’d set us straight. But we knew better. We didn’t believe a word of it.

  12

  PANDORA’S BOX

  DAD CALLED ME into his study after the other kids had been put to bed. Ingrid too had gone to bed, so the house was quiet. It was spring 1964, a few months after I’d turned thirteen.

  He was sitting behind his desk putting his “New Car” folder in order. Whenever he was going to buy a car, he’d set up a new file folder and cram it full of automotive brochures and yellow legal-sized notepads. The folder was already as thick as a telephone directory.

  “Hi, Dad. You wanted to see me?”

  “Oh, hi, Jeff. Come on in. Sit down.”

  While he continued tidying up his papers, I looked around the study. Behind him were shelves stuffed with books—dictionaries, Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, P.G. Wodehouse novels (I think he’d collected the entire “Jeeves” series), numerous Agatha Christie murder mysteries, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, paperbacks about the Second World War. Next to me on the wall were certificates, signed by the now late President Kennedy, appointing George E. Blackstock Vice-Consul of Canada to Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, and other Southern states. On one corner of his desk sat a wood carving of a Spitfire fighter and on the other a photo of Ingrid. Copies of his favourite magazines, Sports Illustrated, Time, and Life, lay on the coffee table behind me. A chess table was set up between a loveseat and a leather Moroccan pouf footrest. (In one of my favourite photos of Mom, she is playing chess with Dad on a similar board.)