Читать книгу Strangers in the House - Candace Savage - Страница 9

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MAKING CONNECTIONS

Je n’aime pas les maisons neuves: Leur visage est indifférent; Les anciennes ont l’air de veuves Qui se souviennent en pleurant.

I don’t like new houses:

Their face is uncaring;

Old ones have the air of widows

Who remember through tears.

SULLY PRUDHOMME, “Les vieilles maisons,” Les solitudes, 1869

AN EXCHANGE OF messages ensues. When I learn that Lorena and her husband live in Regina, a few hours’ drive to the south, my first impulse is to pack my bag of questions, hop in the car, and turn up in time for tea. In my mind’s eye, I can already see myself ringing the bell, waiting eagerly on the front step—but, no, that would be pushing it. It’s one thing to stalk someone else’s ancestors from a decorous distance and quite another to intrude, uninvited, into her day-to-day routine. Better to phone ahead.

The voice on the other end of the line is low-pitched and restrained. No, Lorena hadn’t really known her grandfather Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin. “I was born a month before he died,” she says. “They carried me into the hospital so he could see me. That was all.” Mentally, I rifle through my knowledge of Blondin vital stats. Napoléon died in Saskatoon in the fall of 1946. That would make Lorena a couple of years older than me.

But she’d heard about him growing up?

“Yes, of course. My dad talked about him. He was ‘Paul’ in the family, but I always call him N. S. My dad said N. S., my grandfather, was proud of his ancestors. Proud to be French Canadian.”

“And you? Do you speak French?”

The line goes dead for an instant. Have I insulted her already? How would I feel if someone I’d never met called me out of the blue and started asking personal questions about what I could and couldn’t do? But instead of the click of a cutoff connection, there’s an exhalation of breath.

“No French. Not a word,” she says. “Couldn’t get it through my thick head. I remember the French teacher at my high school, meeting him one day in the hall. ‘You should be a natural for this,’ he said. ‘Blondin. You’re French.’ But we only spoke English at home. I couldn’t get it.” Another pause. “Just couldn’t.”

I think of my very different experience: how my schoolteacher father, whose own lost, ancestral language would have been Plattdeutsch, or Mennonite Low German, fell in love with the vision of a bilingual Canada (and possibly, innocently and briefly, with a fellow teacher who was similarly inclined, adding fuel to the flame). We’re talking about the early 1960s, around the time Lorena would have been struggling with French in school. As for me, I was a kid in small-town Alberta, with no opportunity to test myself against the challenge of a second language and no awareness of the storm of French–English tension brewing in the country during those years. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism was always top of the news, but its findings were wasted on me. All I heard was a static hiss of meaningless, grown-up verbiage.

And yet the vision of a country in which the English and French languages enjoyed equal status in national affairs touched me personally. Every morning when I came downstairs for breakfast, I’d find my patriotic, and usually very dignified, father reading L’actualité, the French edition of Maclean’s newsmagazine, as he pedaled away furiously on his exercise bike. Here was the unexpected, and slightly flushed, face of Canadian bilingualism.

For my dad, putting some muscle into improving his French had become a pleasure of citizenship. And when it was finally my turn to start learning a second language, at the age of fifteen, I was très heureuse. Swotty to my father’s sweaty, I spent my weekends reviewing French grammar and conjugating irregular verbs. (Some people really know how to enjoy themselves.) But if it hadn’t been for that chance to start learning French, or if the language had, for some reason, felt beyond my reach—as it had for Lorena Blondin—I would have grieved the loss. And, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t even the language of my ancestors.

I cast around for something to say, but everything I think of sounds lame. “High school can be so miserable,” I mumble, but fortunately, Lorena isn’t listening. Instead, she’s telling me about a conversation she had with her own dad.

“He told me my grandfather didn’t speak real French. ‘Métis French,’ he said. I said, ‘Yeah, sure. Quebec French.’ But he insisted. ‘No, Métis French.’ ”

“What do you make of that?” No meandering through my own thoughts now: I’m all attention.

“I’ve always wondered, I guess. I have dark skin and brown eyes, kind of Indian looking. I got teased at school. You know.” A beat of silence. “When I told my dad, he said, ‘You just tell them you’re not Native. You’re French.’ So maybe the dark skin comes from my mother’s side, people from Eastern Europe. We haven’t found Métis connections on our family tree. Have you?”

I tell her about the second Napoléon Blondin and my inconclusive research. “But something could still turn up. I’ll let you know if I find out anything, for sure.”

“Okay,” she says. “You know, it’s about your house, that’s why you’re doing this, right? My grandfather built a house in Saskatoon, a new house, and he lost it. That’s the story I’ve heard.”

My heart skips a beat.

“It was on—I’d better check.” She breaks off, and I hear a rustling of pages, as if she is leafing through a file. Please let it be this house. Please. I hold my breath.

“Crestwood,” she says, “it was on Crestwood.” Wrong address.

THE MINUTE I put down the phone, with a promise to talk again, I am on a quest to locate Napoléon Blondin’s mystery building site. I’ve never heard of a Crestwood in Saskatoon, though that doesn’t prove anything. Still, it’s odd that I can’t find any trace of it online, no Crestwood Blvd. or Cresc., not even a cul-de-sac. Odder yet, when I consult the listings in the civic directories—the year-by-year inventories in which Diana had first encountered “Blondin, Napoleon S.”—there’s no sign of it there, either. So it’s not a street name that was used in the past and has since been forgotten. As I’m running through other possible explanations (maybe he built a house in some other town?), an email from Lorena’s husband arrives and saves the day again. It reads:

“Lorena says, ‘I have spoken to my Uncle Charles and [your place] is indeed the house that N. S. built.’ So there you go.”

So there you go, indeed. My unlikely hero, Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin, had not only lived here with his family; he had built the place with his own hands. Every nail hammered into place. Every windowsill leveled and planed. Maybe his wife and kids had moved in partway through construction, allowing those bits and pieces of intimate memorabilia, the shed skin of everyday living, to be absorbed inside the walls. (“I’m sorry, Teacher,” young Ralph might have said. “The house ate my homework.”) From my phone conversation with Lorena, I know that Ralph was her father and that I’d missed my chance to meet him. He had died just over a year earlier, in the spring of 2013, aged ninety-three. Later, I will look up his obituary: “It is with heavy hearts that we have to say goodbye to Ralph Ernest Blondin.” Of Napoléon and Clarissa’s six children, only two are still alive. One, their eldest daughter, has closed the door on the past.

“I’ve tried, but she won’t answer any questions about the family,” Lorena tells me. “She says, ‘It’s over, my childhood is over.’ She says, ‘Why would you want to go back there?’ ”

But the other, her uncle Charles, is different. Although he lives near Calgary, six hours’ drive to the west, and although the Blondin clan has never been especially close, he has always been approachable, always been ready to help. “He’s a good guy,” Lorena says. What’s more, even as an octogenarian, he has a prodigious memory, with perfect recall of every phone number and street address from his youth. If Uncle Charles says this is the place, there’s no doubt about it. It is.

When Lorena and I pick up the phone again, there is only one subject to discuss. When would she like to come for a visit? Having pestered her with my intrusive questions, I am gratified to have something of value to offer in return. Come and see this lovely little house that your very own grandfather built. And you’d like to bring your sister? Yes, of course. And so, the next thing I know, not one but two of Napoléon and Clarissa’s granddaughters are wheeling under the leafy canopy of the gracious street their grandfather chose for his home. Admittedly, the house that stands before them is no longer exactly as he intended it to be. For instance, Keith and I know, from scraping away at the siding, that the building was originally painted white with pale “heritage”-green trim. We have done it up in a soft turquoise, with white window frames and a cherry-blossom-pink front door. We hoped it would look like a place where happy people lived, and if it ended up resembling an ice cream parlor, well, we’d have to take that risk.

The other change we’ve made to the facade is the addition of a small window in the wall of the former-master-bedroom-that-is-now-my-office so that I can look outside as I work. As a result, by craning my neck ever so slightly, I am able to watch as two petite women—one with dark hair piled on top of her head, the other wearing multicolored leggings and sporting locks of reddish gold—climb out of their car, glance around to get their bearings, and step toward the front door. Their shoes ring on the painted boards as they climb the front steps, almost as solid today as they were more than eighty years ago, when their grandfather put them in place.

Once the introductions are over—the dark-haired one is Lorena, as I’d guessed; the redhead, her sister, Fran—we make a looping tour through the house, kitchen to dining room to living room to office to den and then up the steep back stairs. I can’t remember if I mentioned the possible connection between the flow-through layout of the upper floor and the houses of New France. But I do remember how relaxed and at home the sisters seemed to be, as if they were walking through a space that was already familiar to them.

“This must have been where the children slept,” one of them says, considering the connected rooms upstairs. “There were four of them then, weren’t there? The two girls, Don, and Dad.”

“And, remember how Dad used to say he’d sit on the stairs—”

These stairs.

“—and listen to the adults talking in the kitchen?”

“Not just talking. Arguing. There was a lot of shouting. That’s what Dad always said.”

A small figure slumps in the narrow stairway, his ear pressed against the wall. The house rings with angry words: Crisse! Ostie! He is eight years old in 1928, the year the family moves in. He will turn twelve in 1932, the year they leave for a house across the river, a shack with no indoor toilet. Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin built a home for his family, and he lost it. No wonder there was shouting.

THROUGH THE INTERMEDIARY of Lorena’s husband’s emails (“I just leave the computer to him,” she tells me with a wry grin), she has offered to share what she knows about her family’s story. Now, true to her word, and having seen all there is to see of this little house, she produces an ordinary-looking three-ring binder, the kind you can buy in any stationery store. But there is nothing at all ordinary about what it holds. This is Lorena’s collection of family treasures. Look, here is a photo of this very house when it was being built. The earth around the site is bare and trampled, and the structure lacks windows and doors, but from the line of the foundations to the curve of the eaves, the place is unmistakable. If there were any doubt about the authorship of the house—which there isn’t, since Uncle Charles has spoken—this picture would lay it to rest. Napoléon must have downed tools for a moment to document his work-in-progress.

In the background, across the side street, the photo also catches a glancing view of the house where, as I know from perusing those invaluable civic directories, one of his brothers lived for a while. That dwelling was torn down a couple of years ago (a handsome clawfoot tub on the second floor dangling, suspended in midair, before plunging into a cloud of dust and debris) to be replaced by a modernist fortress.

If there was strife and shouting in the Blondin household, it is not evident in the family photos that Lorena is handing around. One snapshot shows three of the Blondin children, aged perhaps eight to twelve, standing up to their knees in a luxuriant patch of potatoes. From the houses in the background, it is clear that the picture was taken on the boulevard outside our back door. “That’s Dad in the middle,” one of the sisters says, pointing to a boy with slicked-back hair and hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. The children are neat and well-dressed and look healthy; their smiles are sweet. And the same sweetness infuses the portraits of their parents, Napoléon and Clarissa, captured (I’m told) on their wedding day, in 1916. The bridegroom is appropriately dark and handsome, with a broad forehead, aquiline nose, and laughing eyes. A faint smile plays around his mouth, as if he cannot quite believe his good fortune. The bride is cherubic, with a glowing complexion, soft curls, and a clear, direct gaze.

“My grandmother was beautiful,” Lorena says, reading my thoughts. “So tiny. Blue eyes. Fair skin.” Her voice softens. “We all loved her. And how she loved to dance.”

“Remember how she’d just show up, unannounced, for a visit?” Fran interposes. “Wouldn’t tell you she was coming. Wouldn’t even let you pick her up from the bus. She was a real free spirit.”

There are lots of pictures of Clarissa in the album. “Clara,” Fran corrects me. “She was always Clara.”

Okay; there are lots of pictures of Clara. Head held high, on a dock, gazing into the distance. Looking adorable in a bicorne hat, a baby in her arms. Squinting into the sun, a hand wrapped protectively around one of her daughters’ shoulders. I recall what I’ve learned about her from my research, in all those weeks when I’ve been pursuing phantoms. Like the Sureau dit Blondins, the Parents are certifiably Québécois de souche. The family’s foundational male ancestor, Pierre, was a master butcher, recruited in the 1650s to serve at Boucherville, the first organized community in New France, where he gave rise to an immense lineage. He and his wife, the astonishing Jeanne Badeau, got things off to a rousing start by acquiring farmland, establishing a successful stone quarry, and engaging in endless litigations with their business associates. Jeanne took a leading role in all these endeavors while at the same time producing a brood of eighteen children. Apart from one who died as an infant, all the others (even the bonus set of triplets) survived to adulthood and produced a grand total of 195 grandchildren. That’s a lot of birthdays to remember. And so things continued through successive generations of Pierres and Simons, Marie-Annes and Marie-Jeannes.

By the early 1800s, Clara’s branch of the family had made its way to the westernmost reaches of French Canada, to settle in the very same parish as the Sureau dit Blondins. It was there that Clara’s great-grandmother Josette Parent gained such a reputation for clairvoyance that people began to seek her out to have their fortunes told. Perhaps she alone foresaw the way in which the two families were fated to become intertwined, for when the push came to expand from Québec into northern Ontario in the 1850s, both families answered the call. In this new setting, Josette offered her prognostications to a broader clientele with the assistance of a niece, who provided translation from French to English.

More to the point of our story, Ontario was also the place where the connection between the Blondins and Parents was first sanctified, through the marriage of Napoléon Sureau dit Blondin’s cousin Rose Anna to Josette Parent’s grandson George. The wedding took place in Tiny Township, Simcoe County, Ontario, in 1897. Rose Anna and George’s eldest daughter, Clarissa Marie, was born there the following year.

“N. S. and Clara were related, you know,” Lorena says, as I hand the photos to her and watch as she snaps the pages back into place. “But I expect you already know that. Second cousins.”

I nod—yes, I did know they were related. I’m not surprised, because marriages between relatives were common among people who lived in close communities; my Sherk great-grandparents had been “kissing cousins,” too. But I don’t let on that Lorena is mistaken about her grandparents’ degree of kinship. Napoléon and Clara weren’t second cousins; they were first cousins once removed.

Still, it’s not my place to sour the moment with my superior expertise. So instead of trying to score a point, I spread out my own small stash of treasures for Lorena and Fran to peruse: the torn pages, the ragged collar (not entirely unlike the one constricting Napoléon’s neck in his portrait), the flattened box inscribed with their father, Ralph’s, childish script. As soiled and broken as these objects are, the sisters pick them up one by one, turn them over, pass them from hand to hand. It’s no small thing to be in touch with the cherished dead.

And there’s also my one surviving photograph to consider, the crumpled negative. By now, I’ve realized that, given the miracles of modern technology, I can scan and print the image without difficulty. As a result, the figures that previously looked like a troupe of zombies have resolved into a line of five normal human beings dressed in old-fashioned clothes (ankle-length dresses for the ladies, wide lapels and hats for the gents), standing in front of a turn-of-the-century car (acetylene-gas headlights, cloth top held up by struts). In the background, beyond the automobile, screened by scrubby trees, a body of water catches the glint of midsummer sunshine.

My gaze sweeps across the line of faces, some of which are too blurred and damaged to read, and settles on the two figures on the right-hand side of the image, a round-faced woman with a steady gaze and a man with a strong nose, his hands plunged deep into the pockets of his trousers. “What do you think?” I ask my guests. “See anyone you know?”

The sisters take their time studying the photograph, but in the end, they both shake their heads. “I’m not sure,” Lorena says. “Maybe try Uncle Chick? He might be able to help.”

“Uncle Chick?”

She laughs. “Sorry. Uncle Charles. I don’t know why we’ve always called him that.” (What a family for pseudonyms these Blondins are turning out to be.)

“Do you think, maybe, he’d—”

“I can ask.” The man is in his eighties, I remind myself, and there is absolutely no reason for him to let me in. Napoléon and Clara’s youngest son. Someone who grew up in their inner circle, a person who’d heard their stories from their own lips. As unlikely as it seems that he will say yes, I can’t help hoping.

TOO SOON, IT is time for the sisters to pack up and head for home. As we say our goodbyes, Fran reaches into her purse and pulls out a small cloth bag. Inside are two porcelain medallions, which, she tells me, are of her own design and making. Would I like one of them?

“She’s the artist in the family,” Lorena says. “We’re very proud of her.”

How could I refuse, not that I want to, of course. As I consider the offerings in Fran’s outstretched palms, the choice makes itself, and my eyes settle on a white disc overwritten with flourishes of black. Three women are dancing a wild fandango across the face of the moon. It’s only much later that I will realize what I have been given. More than a hostess gift. More than a token of acceptance, nosy parker that I am. More than an expression of Fran’s own redheaded persona. What I have in my hand is a memento of Clara, great-granddaughter of Josette, descendant of Jeanne Badeau, a spirited woman with a mind of her own.

AS MUCH AS I’ve enjoyed meeting the Blondin sisters, I have to admit that the visit has left me a little bruised. Before they arrived, I’d felt quite smug about how much I knew, all the precious scraps of information that I’d pulled out of the woodwork, both figurative and literal. (And of course, I was also the go-to person on “first cousins once removed.”) But Lorena, in particular, has made me see how much I still had to learn. The characters I’d been pursuing through my research were as two-dimensional as stickmen, mere names and dates on the page. And even at that beginners’ level of understanding, I hadn’t always succeeded in getting things straight. Unless I wanted to embarrass myself in front of Uncle Chick, I was going to have to do a lot more homework.

For instance, one of the pictures in Lorena’s album was an almost unreadable portrait of a bearded man with a beekeeper’s veil drawn over his head, manhandling a large wooden hive. “Cléophas,” she’d said. “He was N. S.’s father. You know that, right?”

“Yes.”

“This is the only photo we have of him, but I think he must have been quite a character. You saw where he’d listed himself on the census as a ‘free-thinker’?”

Um, no, I’d missed that. Just as I’d missed any and all mention of his third wife, Philomène, who died after the family came west and was buried in the cemetery at the small town of Harris, Saskatchewan. And while I knew that the Blondins had homesteaded in that district and that later Napoléon had run a store in town, I didn’t know anything about the time his business had burned down. No, I hadn’t observed the shocking omission on his marriage certificate—the gaping blank space where his mother’s name should have appeared. No, I hadn’t noticed the almost-twenty-year difference in ages that separated him from Clara.

The lesson was painfully clear. If I hoped to come close to understanding what had befallen this deeply rooted French-Canadian family when it was transplanted to the west, I was going to have to dial up my attention to detail. And even then, even on full alert, I could easily misread the clues. I’d always assumed, for example, that people like the Blondins who have a coherent ethnic identity would be proud of who they were. This is partly because my own mixed European background makes me something of a mutt. (As a child, when I’d ask my mom about our ethnicity, she’d reply casually, “You’re a little bit of this and that, dear. Heinz 57, really.”) So it seemed to me that the Blondins, who had spoken and sung and, yes, shouted at each other in French since the beginning of time, would be proud of their heritage and on guard to defend it. Whether Québec French or Métis French, they would have loved their language. But no. This had not been the case, not for Clara.

“That’s what my dad said,” Lorena had told me. “If my grandfather spoke to her in French, she refused to answer him. Even at home. No French. Only English.”

I was stunned by this revelation. Why would anyone ever think of imposing such a grotesque rule? No French? Not even in the privacy of your own four walls? This isn’t what I had expected from my sprightly dancing girl. Yet, come to think of it, there was not a single word of French on the pages that had tumbled out of the walls. Pas de recettes de glaçage, just recipes for frosting from the Boston Cooking-School. Desensitized by the normalcy of an English-only world, I hadn’t even noticed that the Blondins had parted company with their ancestors.

“I think my grandmother was lonely,” Lorena said, when she saw how shocked I was. “She just wanted to make friends. The other women, I don’t think they ever let her in. It twists my heart to think of it.”

How lonely would you have to be to give up your mother tongue?