“I wonder what’s going on inside his head,” I said to Julie.
“That’s just a broken-down old man,” she replied.
19
DEATH AND REVELATION
OUR FATHER DIED in his sleep of natural causes, nearly half a century after the unnatural death of our mother. He was seventy-three.
The funeral took place on an April morning in 2007, at St. John’s York Mills Anglican Church, Toronto. It was attended by George’s relatives and former classmates from Upper Canada College. Of those who came to remember him, the only one close to Dad was Bob Borden. Bob stage-managed the proceedings, composed The Globe and Mail obituary, and rounded up enough family and friends to fill one-quarter of the church. Julie, Doug and his wife, Maureen, and Marie and I were all there with our teenaged kids. So were Ingrid, her children, and her grandchildren.
I almost stayed away. A few days earlier, I’d argued heatedly with Bob about a crucial detail in his draft of Dad’s obituary. He’d wanted to include a reference to our mother having been Dad’s first wife. Bob ought to know better, I told him. He protested vigorously. He wanted to leave a “normal” memory of Carol as George’s first wife, remembered in his obituary as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened, and that would be that.
“If her name goes in there, Julie and I will not attend. She would turn in her grave after what he did to her,” I shot back.
It was unthinkable to us that she should be mentioned as though her murder had never occurred. The glaring omission might make people take notice, ask uncomfortable questions, and reflect on what had happened to Carol—which was exactly what we wanted.
Bob backed off but didn’t give up. Soon afterwards, I got a call from one of Ingrid’s daughters asking why Carol couldn’t be included in Dad’s obituary.
“Because we’re not going to whitewash what happened,” I replied. It was really none of her business—Carol had died well before she was born—but I could understand how the optics would look terrible to some. Tough.
I checked the newspaper obituary columns before the funeral just to make sure. Indeed, Bob had removed any reference to Carol.
His final version of Dad’s obituary was an odd piece of work in any case. It began conventionally enough: “George died in his sleep on April 16, 2007, just short of his 74th birthday.” But the order of precedence in naming Dad’s family was pure Bob. First were George’s parents and sister, all deceased. Then came the main women in his life—at least the ones who could be named—Ingrid and Ruth, both relationships long since moribund. Then came Bob himself, his lifelong friend, in the middle of things as usual, directing traffic in the mausoleum. Next came Dad’s nephews, who were very fond of him. Only then, at the very end, came his children, all six of us, and his grandchildren. Julie and I couldn’t have cared less, but I felt a bit sorry for Doug, and for Dad’s other kids and his grandchildren, who could now see in black and white just where they stood in the pecking order of George’s life.
Bob, stationed at the church entrance to greet everyone as we arrived, was in no position to complain about our spat over the obituary. But just as I thought we’d make our way to our seats without incident, Jenny Borden appeared. She glared at me full in the face.
“Disgracing your own mother!” she hissed, making no effort to soften her voice.
“Hello, Jenny,” I replied.
Poor Jenny. She appeared to have missed the point entirely. Perhaps Bob had never told her the whole story. Or maybe she just wanted Carol to be remembered, the shameful circumstances be damned. I wasn’t going to argue with her right then, and she knew it.
As we continued to our places, I took in the scene. Front and centre was a portrait photograph of George in his prime. He was wearing a blue suit, his face bathed in light and framed by gladioli. Since he’d elected cremation, there was no casket. Later, Bob would arrange for his ashes to be scattered on his beloved Bass Island as he had wanted. Thankfully, his remains wouldn’t be placed in the Blackstock family burial plot, where Mom was buried.
Ingrid, sitting with her children, nodded to us, as Marie, Jill, Scott, and I slid into the pew behind her. I heard Ingrid say to one of her daughters in a stage whisper, “Poor Jeffrey. He’s an orphan now.” At fifty-six, I found this an amusing concept. And I realized what Doug and Julie had already known for some time: Ingrid didn’t really consider herself our mother.
“But I thought we were all your kids,” I had said naively during her visit to Australia a year earlier.
“I suppose I could have adopted you,” she’d replied offhandedly.
I wasn’t surprised by her comment as we took our seats behind her. But I wasn’t the only one to hear her. Jill was crushed. She was nineteen and immediately understood the implications of Ingrid’s careless remark. But she still had a child’s heart when it came to her “Nana,” as she called Ingrid.
“I didn’t know Nana doesn’t see herself as our real Nana,” Jill told Marie later, almost in tears. Our hearts went out to our daughter.
Across the aisle, I noticed Ted Rogers, the telecommunications and media baron, who was Doug’s godfather and once “Uncle Ted” to us. I recognized one or two other old chums from Dad’s Upper Canada College days, now captains of industry. Collectively, they probably hadn’t seen him for more than a month in all the years since they’d left the school.
Behind me I could hear Uncle Grant speaking to his son, my cousin, and his family. Aunt Katherine had died five years earlier, when Marie and I were in Australia, so we hadn’t been able to attend her funeral. Now, her widower and their kids were here for Dad’s. “Uncle George” had been a model for some of the younger members of the extended family, who had looked up to him. They’d admired his colourful career, his stories about living in exotic places, his impressive properties and other trappings of success.
“Good morning, everyone,” said the Anglican minister presiding over the service. She was a fortyish woman dressed in church vestments, and a bit of an anomaly in this context, since George had probably never known a female minister in his life. She had certainly never met him. But she did add a modern touch to the proceedings.
“Welcome,” she continued, “and thank you all for coming. We are here to celebrate the life of George Blackstock, and we are going to begin with one of his favourite hymns, ‘O Worship the King.’ ”
It was indeed one of Dad’s favourite hymns, and one of mine too—he had introduced it to me. After some shuffling of hymn books, the organ piped up, and the congregation joined in.
The minister read Psalm 23, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” followed by a few well-chosen words suggested, no doubt, by Bob. I pricked up my ears when I heard her say, “We are here to send George in peace, not to judge him.”
“That was quite a mouthful,” Julie whispered to me. “Bravo, Bob.”
Funerals are supposed to bring “closure” of some kind. But Dad’s certainly didn’t, at least not for me. I wish it had. I was approaching the end of my own foreign service career and wanted to look forward, not backward. But with Dad’s death, too many questions from the past remained unanswered. There would be no deathbed confession now, however faint that possibility had been. Confession is good for the soul, they say—but for some, taking one’s secrets to the grave is a better idea.
Forgiveness is also supposedly therapeutic, but I had no appetite for that. Since Dad hadn’t admitted to anything, or asked for our forgiveness, we were in no position to provide it. Even if he had asked for forgiveness, I don’t think I could have given it.
Did I feel grief over his passing? Even less likely.
Guilt? Yes, I still felt guilty for all I hadn’t done to give our mother the justice she deserved. Instead, I was a silent participant at his funeral, a “celebration” of his life.
At the tea after the service, an elderly lady and long-time friend of the family asked i
ndignantly, “But why was Carol not even mentioned?” She spoke loudly enough that people around her looked up, startled, from their teacups. Perhaps a few of them, the older ones who had known Carol, felt a nagging discomfort over the omission. It was an unwelcome reminder of someone who hadn’t been seen or discussed for years, and now couldn’t even be mentioned in George’s obituary.
But for me, Mom’s voice was all the louder for the silence.
* * *
—
SURELY, WE THOUGHT, that was the last we’d hear from Dad. But he wasn’t quite finished trying to direct the narrative.
He had always been a pack rat. He’d accumulated piles of paper over the years, which he stored in boxes and shipped around the globe from posting to posting without ever reopening them. In the boxes were mementoes from his schooldays, newspaper ads for once-new automobiles all the way back to the 1950s, airplane ticket stubs, travel expense receipts, letters, photos, you name it. Bob Borden disposed of whatever he thought belonged in the trash. What remained eventually came to Julie, Doug, and me some six years after Dad died in a plastic box about a cubic foot in size, full of items of our father’s. Some of it, Bob said, related to our mother.
Julie and I opened the box. The first thing we saw was Carol’s red diplomatic passport, the one she’d been carrying when she returned, fatally poisoned, to Canada. There it was, fifty-five years old but looking brand new. And there she was in her photo inside, the mother we loved, looking strong, confident, beautiful. We were there too, her three children, listed with our names and dates of birth. There were just four stamps from border crossings she had made.
Dad had kept her passport through eight postings in six countries, a second marriage, the births of three more children, and a common-law relationship, until the day he died—as though some day it might be needed again. Why had he kept it for so long, after telling us that memories of Carol’s death brought back too much pain, and after disposing of her other possessions without leaving a single thing for us? Now we inherited this small booklet with a tiny photo, a few vital statistics, and some official stamps.
Digging deeper, we found a group of black-and-white photos that struck us as strange. They portrayed several teenaged young men sitting or standing on the rocky shore of a lake on a hot summer’s day. They were all well tanned, and all in the nude. One of them was Dad, at perhaps sixteen or seventeen. Some were smoking cigarettes, others diving into the water. We could only wonder what significance these photos had held for him.
Other contents of the box were more predictable: a photo of Dad as a small boy, posing stiffly with his father; his father’s citations from the First World War; souvenirs of our 1958 voyage on the SS Argentina; a group portrait taken during Dad and Ingrid’s wedding celebrations in Germany.
Then there were the big surprises.
First among these was a series of yellow foolscap sheets covered with notes scribbled in ink in Dad’s familiar handwriting. They appeared to be notes to himself, written in the heat of the moment with a sense of urgency, an agitation verging at times on panic. They resembled spontaneous journal entries, although to my knowledge he had never been in the habit of keeping a journal. The earliest dated from 1984, the year when Julie, Doug, and I confronted Dad in Ottawa with our questions and accusations about Mom’s death. They ended in 1993, after he pleaded with Julie to let him see her son and to give him copies of our documents.
The jottings jumped from thought to disconnected thought. They showed that he was obsessed by our belief that he was responsible for Carol’s death.
How could they think I could have believed that I could do such a thing successfully – the trouble is they think I did do it successfully?
Why don’t they do something about it?
The way we read these words, it didn’t worry Dad so much that we believed he’d killed Mom, as that we believed he could have done it successfully. Perhaps he’d been counting on our thinking him incapable of murder since he’d fear being caught, and therefore it was too high a risk for him to take. This was certainly Doug’s belief.
When, in the third line, he questioned our inaction, he seemed to be asking, “Why don’t they get it over with instead of torturing me with suspense?”
That question led to another: Why didn’t Dad himself do something about it? Why didn’t he take proactive steps to convince us that our suspicions were wrong, that someone else was responsible for Mom’s death? Instead, he seemed paralyzed, unable to take action while waiting for the next shoe to drop.
Although the logic and sequence of the notes are sometimes hard to follow, their overall purpose seems clear: to protest his innocence and clear himself in our eyes.
In his mental quest to find the true culprit, he provided himself with an ambitious to-do list: speaking to the police; going to Buenos Aires, where he might contact a lawyer; hiring a private investigator; and examining medical records at the Montreal Neurological Institute, including “the coroner’s reports.” We have no evidence that he followed through on any of these things.
In one note, he made a very telling reference to the renowned Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz.
Get v.B. book + film Dershowitz hung on his having 1 nite spends
I think “v.B.” was the wealthy socialite Claus von Bülow, whose 1982 murder trial in Newport, Rhode Island, was infamous. Von Bülow was convicted of attempting to murder his even wealthier wife by injecting her with an overdose of insulin, allegedly to put himself in a position to marry his girlfriend and inherit his wife’s fortune. His wife survived but remained in a coma for the rest of her life. Von Bülow appealed his conviction, hiring Dershowitz to lead his defence team, and was finally acquitted on all charges. The case was the subject of Dershowitz’s 1986 book Reversal of Fortune and of the 1990 film of the same name, starring Jeremy Irons as von Bülow and Glenn Close as his wife.
I believe “1 nite spends” was intended to mean one-night stands, but I’m not sure exactly what Dad’s point was. In any event, the von Bülow case would seem a highly dubious basis for arguing his own innocence. To us, it would only point more convincingly toward his guilt.
What, then, had he hoped to learn from the von Bülow book and film? Lessons from Dershowitz’s skillful use of legal arguments to acquit someone convicted of wife-murder? To George, the method allegedly employed by von Bülow, a form of poisoning, would have been reminiscent of Carol’s case. As I understand it, however, and as the film version suggests, big question marks remain about von Bülow’s innocence, despite his acquittal. After all, the acquittal did not determine that he was innocent and wrongly accused, only that it was not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty.
Elsewhere in his notes, George speculated about deflecting blame onto the doctors.
Can any fault be attached to the doctor in charge for not discovering what the problem was in time?
In an equally remarkable attempt to scapegoat others, he cast aspersions on the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
RCMP – Im [sic] very leery. They must know that they left me in a terrible position
They might open case up + stage a hearing just to protect themselves.
This was the first written indication Julie and I had seen of Canada’s national police service investigating George as possibly responsible for Carol’s death. It is logical that the RCMP would have been involved, along with the Montreal police, given the international dimensions of the case. Julie and I had access-to-information searches conducted, but they turned up no references to Carol Blackstock in RCMP files. If any such references had ever existed, the files may have been dumped.
Apart from the reference in our father’s notes, we do impute knowledge of Carol’s case to the RCMP. As Julie astutely observed, the president of the Canadian Society of Forensic Science in 1963, as recorded in the proceedings of the society’s annua
l meeting for that year, when Carol’s case was presented, was none other than Dr. B.B. Coldwell of the Crime Detection Laboratory, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ottawa. Not only that: the proceedings were printed courtesy of that same Crime Detection Laboratory. How many copies of the journal, I wonder, did our fabled federal police force have to run off before it noticed that the case of “Mrs. C.B.” strongly suggested a murder had been committed and the RCMP needed to investigate?
Dad’s notes indicate that’s exactly what he feared might happen. His comment that “They must know that they left me in a terrible position,” and his anxiety that they might still open the case up “just to protect themselves,” suggest that the RCMP knew he was a murder suspect, yet took no further action.
The notes then addressed the issue of motive.
J + J: only motive they can think of is that I knew [I] before. Several people know this is not true but no proof positive
“J +J” are Jeff and Julie, and “I” is Ingrid. It’s telling that he raised this concern, since Julie and I never once discussed motive with our father—and we certainly never suggested Ingrid was a motive for him to kill Carol. This was entirely his own supposition.
He went on to argue that he couldn’t have had such a motive, since he didn’t even know Ingrid in July 1959, when Carol died.
– Fishers [sic] know that [I] and I met only in Feb 1960.
He was citing Bibi and Peter Fischer as potential supporting “witnesses” who could attest to the month when he’d met Ingrid. Since Carol had died more than six months earlier, it would have been impossible that being with Ingrid could have been a motive for him to kill Carol.
Dad also referred in his notes to unidentified documents and to a letter on which he could rely to argue his case.
– by Sept 12/59 they had not discovered the c.o.d. (see letter)
Murder in the Family Page 29