He was back in his crouch, speaking to the table again. We waited in silence.
“But you know,” he resumed, straightening up and crossing his legs to make himself comfortable, “I’ve thought about why I didn’t follow up with the hospital. I believed it was their responsibility to get back in touch with me. But also, I wanted to avoid reopening old wounds. It would have brought back a whole lot of pain,” he said with a grimace. “And I asked myself, ‘What good would it do? Would it bring her back?’ No. She was gone forever.”
He continued his soliloquy while we watched him intently, alert to every nuance.
“I guess I also felt a bit guilty. My wife had just died, and I’d been unable to save her. We had a friend in Buenos Aires who’d urged me to change doctors. But I’d been advised her doctors were the best for treating her condition, so I didn’t. It seemed counterproductive to run the risk of starting all over from scratch.
“After she died, maybe I felt responsible in some way. So maybe I was unconsciously avoiding revisiting everything. It’s a question I’ve never resolved. But I knew I’d never resolve it and I wanted to get on with life. There were you kids to think about.”
He turned to us wearing a wan, desolate expression, like a man who had just relived terrible memories.
Julie had been right: his performance was very smooth indeed, even in front of a critical audience. He’d covered a lot of ground so seamlessly and quickly, it was hard to put your finger on any serious missteps. He’d handled Mary and the police problem especially well. Amid all the practical issues, he’d thrown in some psychology (“unconsciously avoiding revisiting everything”), even an appeal to our emotions, our sympathies, by saying how guilty he’d felt. An added touch was our role in the story: we needed his attention, so he really didn’t have time to focus on Carol’s death, which in any case would have been an exercise in futility.
I knew there was no point getting mired in debating the gaps, inaccuracies, exaggerations, and self-serving distortions in his story. We needed to move forward.
“We’ve heard rumours that Alejandra might have been involved in Mom’s death,” I said. “Did you ever suspect her of anything?”
“I don’t know if I ever really suspected her. We never felt comfortable with her as our cook, but I had no particular reason to think she’d done something criminal. It was just a feeling. I remember searching her room at one point after your mother died, with that same family friend—just to see what we might find. Of course, we didn’t find anything.”
This was a new twist. We’d never heard him say he’d searched Alejandra’s room. It opened the door to new questions, and Julie picked up on it immediately.
“So you did suspect she’d been involved?” she asked.
“We were grasping at straws,” he replied. Dad had a cliché for evading every question.
“One thing I don’t understand,” I said. “Your wife dies very young of mysterious causes, with a lot of physical suffering. You ask yourself if the cook might have been responsible. You have an uncomfortable feeling about her. But despite your suspicion, you keep her on to cook for us the whole time, and for several more months after you return. Why?”
“As they say, Jeff, hindsight is twenty-twenty. At the time, there was no reason to suspect anyone of anything. You know, there are some things medical science can’t explain. Some deaths remain unexplained no matter what. Your mother’s death was one of those. It could have been caused by anything.”
“Oh, come on!” Julie said.
“If you let your imagination run wild, you could spend your entire life looking under every rock. There were times I was tempted to do that. Looking around Alejandra’s room must have been one of them. But then I had to ask myself, ‘Where would it all end? How many people would I have to question? The doctors? The other people in our household? Our friends? Where would you stop?’ I didn’t have a clue what I’d be looking for—or even if there was anything to look for.
“And again,” he concluded, “would it bring her back? Of course not. It made more sense to let the professionals do what they do best. When I didn’t hear from them, I had to assume they’d come to the same conclusion I had: there was no answer.”
He ended with a look of satisfaction on his face, as though he’d just worked through a particularly complex syllogism.
“Weren’t you even curious, Dad, about what she died of?” Doug asked. (It would take Doug a long time to accept that Dad could no longer deny knowing the cause of death once the police questioned him.)
“Well, of course I was, Doug,” he said, as if correcting an errant schoolboy.
“Does our stepmother know about all this?” Julie asked.
Dad paused for a moment, as if for reflection. “I don’t know whether she really does.”
“Give us a break!” Julie fired back. “Either she knows or she doesn’t.”
“I guess she does,” he said placidly, turning toward her.
“And what does she think of it?”
“She probably feels these things happened before her time, of which she has no personal knowledge. She feels it’s none of her business.”
“So, it really didn’t occur to you to check back with the hospital in Montreal?” Julie said.
“No, Julie. As I’ve told you already, it did occur to me,” Dad said, with just a hint of annoyance.
“And after all these years you still swear the first you heard of Mom’s cause of death was when Jeff called you in Minneapolis?”
“That was the first I’d heard of it.”
Julie fell silent, shaking her head in disbelief.
There seemed nothing more to say. Dad, sensing it was time to go, gave each of us a rare, exaggerated hug and vanished into the night. Neither Julie nor I felt comfortable being hugged by him.
Much later, we heard from Ingrid that Dad arrived home that night in an angry mood, slamming the front door behind him, scowling at her, throwing his coat on the hallway chair, and walking directly to his study.
“Did it not go well with the kids?” she asked. “Do you want to talk about it, George?”
“No. Just leave me alone, please.”
From then on, Ingrid referred to that night as “Black Tuesday.”
* * *
—
JULIE AND DOUG stayed behind with me.
“He’s got an answer for everything,” Julie said, almost admiringly.
I nodded. “I nearly believed him too. He just cruised through the minefield around Mom’s murder. He never faltered.”
“He even finessed the inconsistency between Mary’s version of the police interview and his,” Julie said.
“Oh, sure. He was too dazed to realize it was an interrogation. He thought it was a bureaucratic exercise!”
“He handled Alejandra pretty well. Did you like ‘grasping at straws’?”
“That was excellent,” I said, “but I wasn’t expecting the bit about searching her room.”
“I wonder why he said that. He could have left it out. It only raises more questions. Maybe he needs to cover it in advance, so as not to be caught in a lie later. Maybe he wants to say he did something to look into Mom’s death.”
Julie was reading this exactly as I was.
“What do you think, Doug?” she asked. “You were listening carefully the whole time.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just can’t believe Dad would do what you guys think he did. It would have been such a huge risk. What if he got caught? He would have lost everything! It doesn’t make sense.”
“Then why does he lie?” Julie asked. “Look at it logically: if no one ever told him, one way or the other, why Mom died, how could he credibly claim no one ever found out? That’s what doesn’t make sense. The fact is, a multitude of people did find out—the coroner, the MNI, the police, that forensi
c medical journal and its readers, Grandpa and Grandma, Mary, us—and God knows who else.”
I asked Doug, “Do you really believe Dad didn’t know until I told him?”
“No. That can’t be true.”
“Then why would he lie about it?” Julie repeated.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I just can’t believe Dad would do something so risky. And so terrible.” It was obvious how disheartened he felt.
“Doug,” I reasoned, “what if he was experimenting on Mom with arsenic, a little at a time? What if he was waiting to see what would happen? And he got trapped in a situation where he either had to finish her off or get caught? What choice would he have?”
“It’s too crazy. If he wanted to hide what he was doing, why would he have brought her back to Canada?” Doug said.
“Perhaps,” I continued, “it reached a point where she was so sick that he didn’t have any choice. She’d been in and out of the hospital two or three times, and they still couldn’t figure out what was wrong. She’d get better, go home, and wind up sicker than before. The department, the hospital in Buenos Aires, and probably Mom herself were telling him to take her back to Canada—but if he did, the doctors might discover the arsenic before she died. Then they’d question her about who’d been feeding her, and Dad would have been exposed. Under those circumstances, he’d calculate it was better for him to finish her off in Argentina than risk taking her back to Canada alive—and that’s apparently what he tried to do.”
“That sounds so horrible, I just can’t believe he’d do it,” Doug said.
“Can’t believe it? Or won’t believe it, Doug? What about our mother?”
“Jeff, she’s been dead for twenty-five years! Do you really think we’re going to solve the mystery at this late date?”
And so the conversation went. I knew Doug wasn’t going to change his mind—at least not then. Julie and I, though, were more convinced of Dad’s guilt than ever. He’d given us little choice but to cut him out of our lives.
* * *
—
I TOLD JULIE that I would meet with Dad to deliver the message. With her working in Kingston, it would take too long to arrange a meeting among the three of us, and we didn’t want our resolution to lose momentum and peter out. If there were any remaining hope of jarring the truth out of him, this was the only way.
“I’ve got to meet with you, Dad,” I told him on the phone. “Just the two of us. I’ve got something to say to you about our mother’s death.”
“Again? Really? My God, Jeff, I thought we’d exhausted this subject. You know I’ve told you everything I possibly can. Wouldn’t it be better to let the dust settle first? We could meet later, if you still want to.”
“No. I need to meet without delay.”
“Without delay!” he said scornfully. “All right then, if we must, why don’t we meet here at our house?”
“I’d rather go somewhere else. Somewhere private, away from interruptions.”
We agreed to go for a drive that afternoon in my second-hand Russian Lada.
I picked him up at the appointed time, and we drove to a quiet park. When we got there, I put the stick in neutral, turned off the ignition, and pulled the handbrake.
“Julie and I don’t believe you.”
“What do you mean, you don’t believe me?” His voice sounded quizzical, as though he’d just heard something about quantum physics that he didn’t understand.
“I mean we don’t believe your story—about how you never found out how our mother died until I told you.”
“Don’t say that. My God! How can you say you don’t believe me? What part don’t you believe?”
“None of it. None of it makes any sense. Everyone seems to have known about the arsenic but you: the doctors, the police, our grandparents, the department, Mary, now us. How in the world could you not know?”
“I told you. I relied on the hospital to inform me if there was anything to report. When they didn’t, I gathered they never found anything.”
“Yes, yes, we’ve heard you say that over and over. But no one with any common sense would believe it. No reasonable person could accept that you’d take so little interest in your wife’s shocking death that you wouldn’t even bother to check with the hospital or the coroner or any of the others who knew the truth. It’s absurd.”
Dad sat silently with pursed lips, staring through the passenger window into the distance.
“And how could you tell me so categorically that time in Toronto that no one had discovered her cause of death? How could you state that as a fact, if no one ever contacted you about it? That was an out-and-out lie.”
“I’m not sure if I put it quite that way.”
“Of course not. So you have no basis for contradicting me when I tell you that I remember your exact words very clearly.”
More silence.
“We think we know why you came up with this story,” I said, finally.
“What do you mean, came up with this story?”
“Your claim of total ignorance eliminates the need for you to explain anything further.”
“All I can say is that it’s the truth, Jeff.”
“It eliminates the need to explain, for example, why you didn’t press for an investigation into Mom’s death.”
“I believed the police would have contacted me if there was anything to investigate.”
“Really? We noticed your story about your police interview in Montreal evolved somewhat from the first version we heard. At first it was a clerk ticking off boxes on a form. But when we met with you last time, you allowed as how it may have been somewhat more aggressive. We expected that.”
“You expected that? Don’t say such a thing. It sounds like you’re scrutinizing me.”
“We are.”
“My God!”
“We also figured you’d elaborate on the cook’s role—though we weren’t expecting the part about searching her room.”
“You figured!…You figured!”
“Yes. We figured you’d realize how strange and unseemly it would appear not to have shown at least some interest in your wife’s death. But we weren’t satisfied that in searching Alejandra’s room, you were just ‘grasping at straws.’ ”
“I don’t know what else to tell you, Jeff.”
“Why would you search her room if you didn’t suspect her of murder? And if you did suspect her, how could you not know how our mother died?”
“I wish I could tell you more, but—”
“If you suspected Alejandra of using arsenic, why did you keep her in the house with us kids?” After a pause, I concluded, “Unless you already knew she didn’t do it.”
A long silence ensued.
(Much later, Cristina told me that Dad did, in fact, enter Alejandra’s room on one occasion. But his purpose was to confront her about a stolen radio. He fired her on the spot when he saw the missing radio right there in the room, and her boyfriend came around the next day to pick up her things. This would have been in February 1960, some seven months after Carol died. Thus, it appears likely that Dad inserted details from that episode, which did occur, into his story about searching Alejandra’s room, which did not occur.)
Finally, I broke the silence between us. “Another problem we have is your reaction to all this,” I said. “When Julie phoned to tell me about the autopsy report, I was shocked and horrified. When I called to tell you, your first response was silence. Then you became matter-of-fact. Not a scintilla of surprise, let alone shock. You were too busy waiting to hear what I knew to express any emotion. You showed no feelings for your wife and the terrible way she died. No sorrow or pity. And what about us and our feelings for our mother? No compassion. None at all. Even now, I’m getting no such feelings from you.”
“I guess it was all so incredible,” Dad mutter
ed.
“Yes, I guess it was. Julie and I now realize the horrible ordeal you put our grandparents through, threatening to cut them off from us if they did anything to expose you.”
“You already know my views on your grandparents. However well-intentioned they may have been, and I’m not at all certain about that, they were a pernicious influence on our family. We’re sorry their only daughter died so young. But that didn’t justify their interference with you kids. Perhaps I have them to blame for all this—”
I cut him off. I didn’t want to get sidetracked into an argument about my grandparents.
“You have no one to blame but yourself, Dad, for your conduct and your lying, lying about the death, the murder, of our mother—by arsenic poisoning, for God’s sake. Lying about it for a reason, which can only be a pretty terrible one.”
I felt like calling him the bastard he was. But I didn’t want to give him an excuse to get out and slam the car door, armed with a “hysterical” quote from me which he could trot out later.
After another long silence, I said, “Listen, Dad. I’ve done some things in my life that I’m ashamed of. But this is extreme. Julie and I don’t want to live like that. We won’t be seeing you anymore—at least she and I won’t. Doug needs to make up his own mind. The door is always open if you want to tell us what really happened. But you’d better be prepared to answer some tough questions, because we won’t buy any more of your stories.”
“I just can’t accept not having my children around,” he said quietly, and for once he sounded genuine.
“That’s what’s happening.”
“Maybe I could take you two to Argentina and we could investigate down there.”
“You could. But only if we have a credible accounting from you first. We’re not going down there on some useless fishing expedition.”
Murder in the Family Page 25
