Murder in the Family

by Jeff Blackstock

  Before long, Carol and George were drawn into the official social whirl around the inauguration of newly elected President Frondizi. They attended a reception for four thousand guests at the presidential palace, replete with fancy evening dress, numerous bigwigs, and exotic local specialties. “We ate the blood sausages with a smile, sheep entrails with a grin, and the sheep’s eyeballs I couldn’t even work up a leer for,” Carol wrote.

  At a full-dress soirée at the Plaza Hotel, Carol met US Vice-President and Mrs. Richard Nixon. “Your girl has ARRIVED,” she told her parents. She suggested to the vice-president and Mrs. Nixon that in Paraguay, the next stop on the vice-president’s Latin American tour, perhaps they’d meet the American friends she and George had made on the ship, a colonel and his wife, as though they ran in the same circles. When Carol related this bit of naïveté to George, she reported, he nearly broke up laughing on the spot.

  Later in the evening, George was introduced to President Frondizi, but Carol “couldn’t work up enough nerve for that!” Following the reception, she and George went out for dinner and dancing until the wee hours of the morning.

  Our car was finally released from the tangle of Argentine red tape. It was a brand new 1958 Pontiac convertible, white with a black top, a real beauty. Carol no sooner got behind the wheel than she was hit by a horse cart that wasn’t following the rules of the road. In practice, there really were no rules. Her description of the accident in a letter to Toronto is both amused and frightened.

  I sat in the middle of this damned intersection with cars whizzing all around and just pulled over to the side of the road, turned off the key and closed my eyes. When I opened them, there was a mob and I mean a mob of people 6 deep…all around the car jabbering in Spanish…. I made motions for them to go away and they just laughed. I said Policez Polize [sic] and they just laughed all the harder.

  Carol wrote jokingly that George almost wished it was she who’d got hit, instead of the car: “cheaper to replace wife than windshield for 58 Pontiac.” Yet George wasn’t angry with her, she said. Instead, he cursed “the whole damn place,” claiming there were only two traffic lights in the entire country.

  She told her parents that she wouldn’t hear a word of reproach from George until the day she died.

  * * *

  —

  I WAS MUCH too young to be at boarding school, Mom told Grandma and Grandpa. But St. John’s was just too far from the hotel (twelve miles) for me to commute every day.

  My boarding house at St. John’s, a rambling Victorian building that could have been a mansion once, was situated several blocks from the classroom building. It had a large sitting room where I and twenty other boys watched The Cisco Kid on an old television set as a Friday night treat. Most of the boarders were Argentine-born but of European heritage: English, Spanish, German, or Italian. Many came from other parts of the country, where few comparable schools were to be found, and none providing an English-language education, as St. John’s did—considered a ticket to the privileged class in Argentina.

  St. John’s had a rigid daily routine. Breakfast at the boarding house was buns, jam, and tea with lots of hot milk. Morning classes were all in English. We learned how Sir Francis Drake defeated the Spanish Armada after a game of bowls. We learned arithmetic using pounds, shillings, and pence, in a country that used pesos and the decimal system. A hot dinner was served at midday in the classroom building, featuring a stew of stringy overcooked beef, turnip, and potatoes, with a flavourless flan or pastry for dessert. The smell in the dining room was mildly nauseating. Afternoon classes were all in Spanish, so at first I had no idea what was going on. While getting through my school year turned out not to be an issue, nevertheless, being unable to understand a word was a powerful incentive to learn Spanish.

  After school, I made the long walk back to the boarding house, passing villas behind tall hedges and eight-foot white fences, and keeping a wary eye out for horse dung where vendors’ carts had stopped. Later, while the other boys played soccer in the yard, I leaned against the wall in the hallway and wept from homesickness. The cleaning ladies noticed and whispered to one another.

  When I gratefully returned to the hotel for the weekend, Mom said I seemed much more grown up, thanks to St. John’s. I was making my own bed, shining my own shoes, tying my own tie. I didn’t tell her what it was really like: getting beaten up under the blankets by my dormitory mates because I had a teddy bear, sitting in class all afternoon with little comprehension of what the teacher was saying, sobbing from loneliness. I didn’t tell my parents, because I didn’t want to complain.

  * * *

  —

  AS I NOW realize from her letters home, Carol was homesick too. George was on the road to Mar del Plata, the first of many trips he’d take during his posting, and Carol wrote to her parents that she was bored and lonely. She felt we were “drops in the bucket…thousands of miles away” from the people who cared about us. With the servants running the household, she had nothing to do and felt a lack of purpose, which she found “terrible.” She’d never be a successful “Mrs. Rich Bitch.”

  Before going on your first posting in the foreign service, they tell you that you’ll go through a honeymoon period when everything is new and charming. Then you’ll feel lonely, and possibly depressed, and will hate everything in the new country. But gradually you’ll adapt to your environment, and things will start looking up. For Carol, sure enough, life suddenly took a turn for the better.

  She and George had been unable to find a suitable home to rent within the Canadian government’s budget for foreign service officers. But now they received an increase in their housing allowance and, with George back from his trip, they resumed house hunting in earnest. Life became busy again. Carol joined the American Women’s Club, only to hear a presentation from a parapsychologist who was nothing but a “good fortune teller with a new twist…in other words, a quack!”

  The economic realities of this third-world country, as it was considered then, kept intruding. A sugar strike in Tucumán province meant there was no sugar to be bought at any price. The toilet paper was “terrible when you can get it and worse when you can’t.” Nevertheless, Carol continued to make friends both with expatriates and Argentines. She seemed able to connect with everyone—almost everyone.

  Around that time, she and Dad had a huge fight. From the bedroom I shared with Doug, I could hear them arguing in the kitchen. Mom was complaining about being cooped up in the apartment suite and Dad never being around to help out or spend time with the family. They’d had arguments like that before from time to time, but this one was a real blow-up. Mom wasn’t the least bit timid about talking back to Dad. The argument quickly escalated into a shouting match.

  I didn’t like it when they yelled at each other. But from experience, I knew what to do. Waiting for a lull in the storm, I peeked into the kitchen and asked if I could take Doug, teddy bear in hand, to visit the apartment of some friendly childless neighbours down the corridor. Dad turned to me and said that was a good idea. We beat our retreat, and the maid took Julie out for a walk to get her away from the fighting.

  Later, before Mom and Dad went out for the evening, she told the maid to serve me some tomato soup, my favourite. Mom knew I never got it at boarding school. She always found some way of making things better.

  * * *

  —

  ON JUNE 21, 1958—winter in Argentina—Carol and George finally found a house to rent. Its owner was a famous local figure, Jorge Antonio, Juan Perón’s business partner. According to Carol’s letter home, Antonio was “crook number 2” after “crook number 1,” Perón himself. It seemed Antonio had left the country in such a hurry, he took only one suitcase. The amnesty for Peronistas after the military coup did not extend to either Perón or Antonio. In his submission to headquarters seeking approval of the very reasonable rent, George’s boss, Mr. Bissett, described the sit
uation more delicately: “I think the main reason it [the house] came to the market at this [low] figure was that the owner was absent from Argentina for political reasons and may think it inadvisable to return at the present time.”

  In plain English, the embassy would be renting from a fugitive from justice. Later, soon after we left Buenos Aires, the house would be confiscated by the Argentine government among other illicit property held by Jorge Antonio.

  The house came fully furnished. The embassy leased it for two years, with an option for another eighteen months. One problem was that it didn’t come with a cook. While the maid who had worked for the Antonios was available, Carol wrote, “She does not cook and I really need a cook.”

  Ambassador Picard threw a huge cocktail party for George and Carol, welcoming them into the embassy “family.” There were more parties around Dominion Day, our national holiday, now renamed Canada Day.

  In a letter to her parents, Carol was ecstatic about our new home, describing it as “everything I could want.” Located in Acassuso, the same suburb as my school, it was a white stucco two-storey villa with a huge garden for flowers and vegetables, bordered by nine big pine trees. It had a living room that was “spacious, gracious and above all cozy,” with a fireplace “of dark walnut and dark green marble” (Buenos Aires gets chilly in the winter) and a big picture window looking onto the garden. The dining room was panelled in dark walnut. The kitchen was so modern that it was “a seven-day wonder for this part of the world.” There were four bedrooms in the main house, a two-car garage, and a casita, a separate building in the back, serving as living quarters for household staff, including our new cook, Alejandra.

  “I love [our new house] so much that I hate to go out,” Carol wrote. “It was worth every wearisome day in the hotel.”

  The family moved in while I was still boarding at St. John’s. By chance one day, while walking from the school to my boarding house, I was surprised to come across our Pontiac convertible parked outside the house. I ran inside to look for Mom and Dad, but found only our maid and some workmen moving furniture. The family was out walking Lassie. I was so excited that I waited eagerly until they returned half an hour later, forgetting all about tea at St. John’s.

  “Jeff, what are you doing here?” Dad asked.

  “I was so happy, I wanted to see you.”

  “Well, we are happy to see you too, but shouldn’t you be at school?”

  “I guess so.”

  Mom got me a jar of peanut butter to take with me, kissed me, and sent me on my way. Mr. Legge, the headmaster, was looking at his watch when I arrived at the boarding house. Tea had started.

  Before long, I was living at home and attending St. John’s as a day boy. I felt as thrilled to be away from that boarding house as a prisoner released from a gulag.

  It didn’t take long before we all began to feel settled. Carol’s letter to her parents in July 1958 describing a typical day must have amazed and amused them.

  At eight o’clock Alexandra comes tripping gaily upstairs loaded with our tray of goodies for breakfast. Fresh fruit and porridge (for George, ugh), bacon or eggs (for George, ugh) and toast and coffee and tea (for me, yum). Then George gets up, takes his bath, gets dressed, reads the paper, has another cup of coffee. Then in troop the little darlings all breakfasted, washed and dressed. They stay a few minutes and then go down with Daddy to say goodbye, open the gates for him, and watch him speed off in a cloud of dust. Meanwhile, back in the bedroom, the cook has come up to consult with me about the day’s menu. Actually (and don’t let this get about) what she does is try to tell me what we are going to eat that day in Spanish. My replies are invariably “Si, si.” Then I get up and start seeing to the day’s activities. Believe me there is still plenty for me to do. Why I actually made my own bed today. Then before you know it my lunch is brought in on a tray to the living room and then it is time for my siesta. When I get up I have my bath, go down and see how the children’s tea is coming along and go out for a walk in the garden. Our kids are so good. Why you know, they just never cry. That is a phrase I seem to have heard somewhere else, now I know why. The children have their tea and then their bath and wait for Daddy to come home, sitting demurely in front of the fire with their dressing gowns and slippers on. (If the truth were known, tonight Dougie was dropping marbles on [the maid] Mary’s head from upstairs, while she was trying to phone downstairs. Julia was pushing her doll carriage around the dining room table tripping up Alex as she came in with a load of glass and silver. Jeff was fiddling with the TV and driving us all cuckoo and I was drying up the water I had just spilt on the carpet. George was honking at the gates to get in and we all dashed at once. Well, that’s the Blackstock family for you and if it wasn’t that way we wouldn’t be we. SO THERE.)

  Carol concluded, “Daddy, this should reach you just in time for your birthday. I do hope you have an especially good one this year. We are all sorry we can’t be there to help you blow out the candles.”

  George practically never wrote to his mother. So in August, Mom wrote to Granny with family news, including Doug’s tall tale of how Lassie had eaten the missing bananas, for which Dad gave Doug a spanking, and Julie getting into Mom’s nail polish. She mentioned losing our housemaid, but didn’t say she’d had a run-in with her when we came home one evening and dinner wasn’t prepared. The maid quit in a huff.

  My mother tapped into the expat network for a replacement and found María, who turned out to be a treasure. María not only became our housemaid but also devotedly looked after us children, and Mom too. In time, she’d come to mean even more than that to us.

  María was fortyish and heavy-set, with dark skin, black hair tied back, and a round, kind face. She moved into the casita at the back of the property with her husband, Martín, a six-foot-two stonemason, and Cristina, their thirteen-year-old daughter.

  I don’t know where Mom found the new cook, Alejandra, who moved into the top floor of the casita. Alejandra (Mom called her Alexandra or Alex) was a shapely, tan-skinned woman in early middle age. Other people also worked at the house—gardeners, seamstresses, cleaners, and painters—but didn’t live in.

  In a letter to Joan Clark, Carol said that with so much help around the house, she was living the “life of Riley.” She and George were constantly out at parties and also entertained a great deal, as expected of diplomatic couples. On one occasion, they hosted a cocktail party for 110 guests at our home. I watched from an upstairs window as white-clad servers in the garden below wended their way among elegant strangers in evening dress conversing in various languages, cocktail glasses in hand.

  * * *

  —

  MY PARENTS HIRED a private tutor, Mrs. Toppie, to help Doug and me with our homework. Mrs. Toppie was from Hungary and spoke perfect English and Spanish. She reviewed all the work we brought home from school, pencilling check marks and X marks in the margins. Then she gave us her own homework on top of the school work, which we really didn’t enjoy.

  I acquired a strong English accent from St. John’s, Doug an American one from his nursery school, and Julie a Spanish one from the household staff. Mom told her parents that Dad had thrown up his hands about it. I soon got to know the neighbourhood kids, from the fifteen-year-old gardener across the street, to the Americans whose father worked for General Electric, to the Swedish-American family whose father worked for Caterpillar. I became friendly with the street vendors selling ice cream, gardening services, sacks of potatoes, and other offerings.

  On Sundays, María, Martín, and Cristina took Doug, Julie, and me to the house Martín was building for them in Boulogne, a working-class area of dirt lots on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. I imagine Mom and Dad, with their hectic social life, were happy to have María take us off their hands for a day, and María was probably happy for the extra babysitting money. She, Martín, and Cristina always treated us as part of their family. Some of my war
mest boyhood memories are those Sunday visits with them.

  Back then, Boulogne was a neighbourhood in the making. A couple of hundred yards away, earth ramparts and bulldozers marked the construction of the Pan-American Highway. Someday, it would connect the neighbourhood to New York, Martín told me. He showed me how he mixed cement mortar using sand, lime, and water, then laid the bricks for the house, cutting some to make them fit. He had a charcoal pit with screening for a grill, on which he threw huge slabs of beef for our asado. In the outdoor kitchen—consisting of a wash pan and makeshift counters—María and Cristina would prepare a big salad.

  When our filetes de lomo were ready, we ate them outside on a table made from a wooden door resting on sawhorses. With the steak still red and juicy inside, we had the salad and lots of crusty bread. Martín brought out vino tinto and gave me a bit mixed with lots of water. He said it added a little colour to kids’ complexions. Afterwards, we drank café con leche [coffee with milk].

  After lunch, I played with the neighbourhood kids. We played soccer in the dirt, putting down rocks for goalposts. We set off firecrackers that you lit like a match—no fuses. One blew up in my fingers, and I spent the rest of the day dunking my hand in a pail of water to relieve the burning sensation.

  One Sunday, I asked Dad to lend me his Canadian football. I wanted to take it to María’s for playing soccer with the other boys. They didn’t own a real soccer ball and used anything they could find—cast-off rubber balls or tennis balls. Dad sat me down and told me how long he’d owned that football, how important it was to him, how it was the only one he had. He made me promise not to leave it where it might be stolen, or to lose or damage it.