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
