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?
4
La tristesse vient de la solitude du coeur.
Sadness comes from
the loneliness of the heart.
MONTESQUIEU, Arsace et Isménie, 1730
I WALKED THE SISTERS to their car and watched them drive down the block. What was I to make of Lorena’s revelation? Yes, it was disappointing to think that Clara Blondin might have been unhappy here. But to give up your natal language? Really, that was too much. I stomped back to the house and pulled the door shut with a thump.
There had to be more to the story, some deep ache, something I didn’t yet understand. The more I reflected on Clara’s unaccountable decision, the more I began to suspect that it needed to be seen with a wider lens, as part of a bigger story. What if the isolation that she had suffered hadn’t been hers alone? What if her loneliness, like her Frenchness, had passed down through her family tree, from generation to generation?
After all, there had been a moment when, for the people of New France, eternity had stopped, when roots that spanned centuries and continents had been abruptly cut off.1 In my mind’s eye, I can still almost see the paragraphs in my high school history text (right-hand column, black type on a glossy page) recounting the defeat of the French by the British on the Plains of Abraham in 1759. I remember the twist in my heart when I learned that France had deliberately abandoned its own children, the sixty thousand French colonists who were settled along the Saint Lawrence, preferring instead to retain a cluster of sugar-producing islands in the Caribbean. In the end, the French Catholic people of New France had been ceded to the Protestant British not by the sword but at the conference table, with a flourish of a quill pen. And my Napoléon and Clara’s great-great-grandparents had been among them.
“DO YOU THINK things that happened in the past, way back, a century or two ago—” I begin haltingly, stop, and start again. “I mean, do you think that the big events of history sometimes echo down through people’s lives for generations afterward?”
I’m putting my questions to Keith. (With Diana long since grown up and launched into a life of her own, he is the person I naturally turn to for wise counsel.) Now he is looking at me askance, as if surprised by what I’ve just said.
“Yes, of course,” he answers. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Even if the people all those years later, the descendants, don’t know the details about what happened in the past?”
