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
