The Quintland Sisters

by Shelley Wood

  “Nonsense,” she said, then set me the task of bleaching and boiling all the cotton diapers Dr. Dafoe had brought that morning.

  I didn’t hear anyone coming up the porch steps, so I started at the sound of a loud rap at the door.

  Ivy pulled it ajar, the back of her hand already abutted against her hip so as to give these latest lookie-loos a piece of her tongue for barging all the way up onto the porch. But they weren’t locals—they were two city men who’d arrived in a fancy car. They were carrying big cameras on stilts and said they’d driven all the way from Sault Sainte Marie and Montreal to film the babies for the newsreels.

  Ivy was firm. “M. Dionne is not presently at home,” she said.

  The men started in with a long list of protests and explanations, and one slid his toe past the doorjamb. Ivy lifted a finger to her lips and crunched her eyebrows together at them, nudging the man’s polished leather shoe back over the threshold with a tap of her own foot.

  “Shhhhh!” she hushed. “You will wake Mme. Dionne, and you’ll rouse the babies. They are very, very frail.”

  The men retreated to the yard, and we watched them through the window to see what they’d do. They leaned on the hood of their four-seater and struck up conversations with the steady stream of curious folks stopping by. After a few minutes, Dr. Dafoe pulled up in his sleek green car, and both men got busy behind their big cameras and started asking him questions.

  Ivy had drawn the muslin over the kitchen window to keep people from peering in, but she’d cracked the sash in the hope of getting a bit of a breeze. Now she stood with her ear to the gap to hear what Dr. Dafoe was saying.

  No need, as it turned out. Seconds later the door was swinging open again, and Dr. Dafoe was leading the men into the kitchen.

  “Of course, of course,” he was saying. “A true miracle of creation, all identical. They are unlikely to all be alive tomorrow, so it’s important to have a record.”

  If that was all true, it was a bold move waltzing in with the motion picture men without checking first with Ivy. What if one of the babies had died while Dr. Dafoe was out? What if the newsreels showed just four babies or three?

  Ivy was angry, I could tell, but she waited for the men to set up their cameras, then lifted the blankets off the box.

  Just then, M. Dionne burst through the front door and all hell broke loose.

  “Get out, get out!” he started screaming in English, then in French for good measure. One of the cameramen swung his huge contraption around and tried to film M. Dionne grabbing his colleague by the collar of his shirt. I thought M. Dionne was going to kick the camera right over.

  Dr. Dafoe cleared his throat and urged all three men back outside with a sweep of his arm, shutting the door behind him. I could hear him attempting to say something to one of the newsreel men, but they were busy trying to film M. Dionne, who had shouted a stream of obscenities and dashed back into his truck, saying he was going for the police. He spun out onto the road in a cloud of dust, and the cameramen, incredibly, hopped in their big car and started after him, one of the men trying to maneuver his big camera out the passenger-side window!

  Dr. Dafoe stood on the porch watching, taking out a little bag of tobacco, packing his pipe, then lighting it. The kerfuffle had woken the babies, first the little ones, then the bigger ones, which is a funny way to describe them when they are all so small. Their cries were so soft, like robin chicks piping for their mother to return with a worm. Dr. Dafoe must have heard it all the same, because after a few puffs he tapped the bowl on the rail, pocketed his pipe, and came back indoors.

  I lasted until just after two or three in the afternoon, when the Red Cross nurse, Marie Clouthier, returned, bringing with her another nurse and an orderly, both English, plus two ounces of breast milk that Sister Felicitas had managed to drum up at St. Joseph’s Hospital. There was not enough to go around, so Dr. Dafoe insisted it be given to the three smallest. By then the priest had returned with M. Dionne and they were praying with Mme. Dionne in the next room, deciding on names for the babies.

  At one point M. Dionne drifted into the kitchen and told Ivy he’d be happy to run her home in his truck if she needed some rest. She demurred, saying she wasn’t feeling tired, which couldn’t have been true. She’d been on her feet most of the night. I’d been at the Dionne farmhouse nearly twenty-four hours longer than Ivy, of course, and I was exhausted. But I didn’t say so, and M. Dionne did not turn my way to repeat his offer. I certainly wasn’t looking to go anywhere with M. Dionne. He was a different man now than he’d seemed the night he and Marie-Jeanne had picked me up after midnight. Less than two days ago, I realized. It seemed a lifetime. He appeared calmer now that his wife showed signs of recovery, gliding quietly through the house, fixing Dr. Dafoe and the nurses with long, glowering looks and muttering in French under his breath.

  Dr. Dafoe, it seemed, spoke no French or at least had chosen not to speak a word of it since his arrival on the night of the birth. Even M. and Mme. Dionne he addressed in English, which M. Dionne clearly understood. Ivy and I slipped easily between French and English, and stuck with English when Dr. Dafoe appeared. Now, with more personnel from the hospital crowded into the main floor of the farmhouse, the balance had tipped to English.

  M. Dionne went back to his wife’s bedside, and Dr. Dafoe started packing his black bag at the kitchen table. I touched his sleeve. “Can you drop me at my home?” I asked, and he blinked his small eyes behind his glasses and bobbed his head by way of assent. As I was following Dr. Dafoe out the door, Ivy called my name. The other women didn’t look up. “Emma—you’ll come back, won’t you?” She smiled her crooked smile. “Come back and rescue me as soon as you can.”

  May 30, 1934

  I RODE MY bicycle back out to the Dionne farmhouse this morning, unprepared for the mob of people milling around the edges of the yard like so many clucking chickens—a steady stream of bicycles, cars, and trucks coming and going. The North Bay Nugget had run the picture taken yesterday on page one. Now, hemming the Dionne property were at least three dozen men, women, and children, and not a single person I knew from Callander.

  An older man I recognized as M. Dionne senior, the babies’ grandfather, was pacing the yard, spiking the air with a pitchfork and looking every bit like a bandy-legged devil roused from bed, his cottony hair standing up in a thick clump at the back. He was thundering at people to move on, but everyone was staying put, hectoring him with questions. Newspapermen clearly made up at least half of the crowd, bowler hats pushed back on their heads, some with pencils behind their ears and notebooks in their breast pockets. Others had cameras hanging heavy around their necks, their shirtsleeves rolled up in the heat. After a short while, the door to the farmhouse opened and Ivy stepped out onto the porch.

  “Emma,” she called. She had one hand pulling the door closed behind her as heads craned to see inside, but she beckoned with her free hand. “Come on in,” she said.

  The air in the farmhouse was even closer than yesterday. There was a heavyset girl I didn’t know working at the sink and another woman at the bedside of Mme. Dionne, who was sitting up somewhat, a bit of color returning to her plump cheeks. Ivy looked tired, but still lovely, I thought, wisps of hair curling out of her bun in the thick, damp warmth of the room.

  On the floor of the kitchen, pushed against the far wall, sat a stout wooden box with two round knobs on the lid. It looked like a deep crib or coffin—roughly three feet high and two feet deep with glass set into its top. When I peeped under the blanket of the crate by the fire and saw only two babies inside, I gasped, my fingers flying to my lips. I swung around to face Ivy, but she shook her head and smiled wearily.

  She gestured at the big wooden box.

  “It came from Chicago early this morning,” she said, pulling me toward it and pointing to the thermometer set into its side. “It’s an incubator to keep them warm and safe from germs. It’s ancient—runs on kerosene instead of electricity.” Throu
gh the square pane of glass I could see the three little ones, curled around one another like puppies, sleeping soundly.

  “They are doing okay now, but you missed the excitement earlier.”

  She told me the littlest ones had turned blue and their hearts had stopped, but Dr. Dafoe, luckily, had been there when it happened and prescribed some drops of rum, retrieved from a cabinet in the adjoining room. Now Ivy and the other nurses were resorting to rum every time the fragile breathing of one of the babies showed signs of slowing to a standstill. You could see the strain in the faces of the women. The girl at the sink, Claudette, had been brought in from a nearby farm to help with the washing, and the young woman with Mme. Dionne was another sister or cousin, tasked with plumping pillows, spooning the patient her potage, joining in prayers, and doing whatever else was needed to ensure the patient remained in bed.

  “She’s christened the babies,” Ivy whispered, smiling her sideways smile. “Do you want to meet them properly? You’ll like this.”

  We went back to the box by the stove, and Ivy slowly lifted the blanket aside. “Madame named this one Yvonne for me,” she said, pointing to one of the largest, her face lighting up as she said it. “And the other bigger one here is Annette.”

  She then walked over to the incubator and pressed a finger against the glass lid. “This here is Cécile and next to her, Marie, supposedly for Nurse Clouthier, but my guess is more likely the Holy Mother. The smallest—” Ivy looked up to watch my face. “The smallest I believe she named for you. This is Émilie. That could be a variation of Emma, don’t you think?”

  I looked up at Ivy, then leaned closer to peer again through the warped glass. Émilie! They were still little more than wrinkled wads of skin, but after I’d spent so many hours watching them struggle for life, they’d filled my dreams the previous night.

  “They are little fighters, they are,” Ivy murmured. She’d drifted back to the box and was swiftly removing one of the blanketed hot-water crocks and replacing it with a new one from the stove. “Keep it up, girls,” she whispered and adjusted their makeshift tents to cover them again.

  EVERY FEW HOURS, we lift them out one by one and rub them gently with oil as if they’re clad in the finest tissue, our touch as light as air, and give them a few drops of breast milk from an eyedropper.

  M. Dionne had vanished to the stables at the back of the property, but Ivy told me he’d spent almost an hour with Mme. Dionne and the priest that morning, arguing about all of the people in the house and what the medical bills would be. She’d eventually been forced to tell him that Madame needed to rest, and he had gone off in a huff.

  Sometime in the afternoon there was a soft knock at the door, and it was a relief to open it and admit a sip of fresh air into our sweltering cave. Ivy had little Cécile in the crook of her elbow and was giving her some milk, and Nurse Clouthier had gone back to Bonfield, so I was the one to greet the visitors, opening the door by a slim crack and slipping into the breeze on the porch.

  On the doorstep was possibly the most striking man I’d seen outside of a magazine or film. In his midthirties, I’d wager, perhaps older, he wore a white shirt that looked crisp and starched, despite the strength of the sun. He had thick black hair and a smooth complexion, tanned as if he’d spent the spring somewhere sunnier than Northern Ontario. His eyes were a warm brown, and when he spoke it was in a soft, measured tone. Everyone else who’d been disturbing us all day and yesterday had rapped too loudly or spoken in booming voices that were unsettling for the babies. This man knew better.

  But he, too, I noticed next, had a camera slung over his shoulder, tucked almost out of sight behind his elbow.

  “No photographers,” I said and was about to step back inside.

  “Fred Davis,” he said quickly. “Please, miss. I’m a photographer from the Star. We’ve driven all the way here today with the equipment ordered by the specialist, in Toronto.”

  I could feel his soft eyes taking in my birthmark, and, to his credit, he didn’t glance away.

  “We have the tub, feeding tubes, the clothes, blankets, and I don’t know what else.” He stopped, waiting for me to find my voice. “Everything we’ve brought is for the quintuplets.”

  Quintuplets! I had never heard the word. It sounded like something from Greek mythology, but I realized he was talking about the babies.

  At the bottom of the rickety steps that led up to the porch stood two other men, both in their telltale bowler hats, and with them a woman, petite and pretty, in the white dress and cap of a nurse. At that very moment, Dr. Dafoe emerged from the curious crowd on the edge of the yard, his black bag in hand, pipe pursed in his lips.

  He removed it as he approached the steps. “Davis?” he asked and looked from one man to another. The men at the foot of the stairs thrust out their hands, and Davis, quicker than you could blink, swung his camera to his face, pointed it at the doctor with the reporters, and started to click and wind, click and wind. The petite nurse smiled and bobbed her blond head, extending a graceful gloved hand of her own.

  The men, after conferring with the doctor, headed back to their car. Dr. Dafoe gestured toward the senior M. Dionne, who was hovering nearby, and spoke with him briefly, apparently clarifying that these city men should be permitted access to the house. The junior M. Dionne, the babies’ father, was nowhere to be seen. I ducked indoors again, intending to tell Ivy about the handsome photographer from the Toronto Star, but to my surprise, Mr. Davis swiftly slipped in after me, shutting the door gently behind him.

  Ivy had Cécile back in the wooden incubator again, so none of the babies were in sight. I watched Fred Davis blink as he took in the drab kitchen, his eyes adjusting to the dim room, roving over the sheeting we’d rigged around the stove, the clutter of equipment we’d tried our best to organize on the tables and shelving. Then his gaze came to rest on Ivy. She had turned away from the incubator, her cheeks flushed, her forehead creased with worry. She started when she saw the man behind me.

  “Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

  “Ma’am,” said Fred Davis. His eyes, which a moment earlier had been bobbing like a brook over everything in our makeshift nursery, now came to a halt on Ivy, as if snagged. He, too, was at a loss for words, finally managing, “It’s my great pleasure.”

  Just then Dr. Dafoe stepped into the kitchen and beckoned Mr. Davis back outside with a wave of his undersize hands. Mr. Davis along with the younger reporter from the Star managed to wrestle their crates up onto the porch under the supervision of the older man, Mr. Keith Munro, also related to the newspaper in some way, who stood in the dusty yard barking out commands from behind a bushy, white mustache. The little blond nurse, named Jean Blewett, turned out to be a proper nurse who’d graduated from a college in Toronto. She busied herself ferrying smaller packets and boxes from the crates to the kitchen. Only when the men were done did she step primly into the next room to introduce herself to Mme. Dionne, Mr. Davis right at her heels. I hadn’t even noticed him taking up his camera again, but he managed to pop off a few photos of Nurse Blewett and Mme. Dionne, using a flashbulb because the light was so dull. This greatly upset Mme. Dionne, who I presume had never seen a flashbulb before—nor had I—and she started fussing and speaking in rapid French to the new nurse, whose blue eyes blinked. She couldn’t understand a word.

  Claudette, the hired girl, must have gone to the stables for M. Dionne, because he burst into the farmhouse and started hollering at the photographer and reporters to hightail it off his property. Ivy told me he had been angry that morning with how the newspapers had written about him yesterday. This was the first time we’d seen him truly livid, spluttering with rage in a mix of languages, those strange, long earlobes of his—indecent somehow—quivering in indignation. Maybe I should have more sympathy for M. Dionne. His house is overrun with strangers, his other children dispersed among the homes of family and friends. No one in that part of the world has money to feed an extra mouth, let alone five—he must be look
ing at all this equipment and the nurses and be worried sick about what the bill will come to, let alone how he’ll support a family now doubled in size. But he really scared me then, shouting like a madman in front of the babies and his wife, now sobbing in her bed. Dr. Dafoe was angry too. I could see it. The doctor isn’t an easy man to read, but he, too, is likely feeling the growing interest in the little babies and the burden of keeping them alive.

  “Mr. Dionne,” he said tartly. “A word.” And the two men stepped out into the evening.

  I waited until all our city guests were gone before pressing Ivy about Mr. Davis. “But had you met him before?” I was watching her face. “Mr. Davis seemed like he already knew you, and you him.”

  Ivy was busy sorting through the parcels and boxes, a seemingly endless number of cotton diapers, tiny bonnets, blankets, petticoats, shirts, safety pins, nursing bottles, tubes, and more. The idea of our minuscule charges ever being hale enough to need shirts and petticoats seemed laughable, but it gave us hope just fingering the tiny things, so clean and white in the gloom of the farmhouse.

  “Ah, no, but I think I’d like to know him already, if you know what I mean,” she said, her impish smile tucking neatly into her left cheek. “It’s high time this job came with a few perks, wouldn’t you say, Em?”

  June 1, 1934 (North Bay Nugget)

  * * *

  OLIVA DIONNE SIGNS HANDSOME CONTRACT TO EXHIBIT FAMILY AT CHICAGO

  “They are improving steadily. That doesn’t guarantee anything. Two of the babies nearly passed last night, but this morning I felt more optimistic than at any time since their birth.”

  In this way Dr. A. R. Dafoe expressed the condition of the quintuplets born last Monday morning to Mr. and Mrs. Oliva Dionne, Corbeil.

  The babies are now being fed on nothing but human milk and this morning 18 ounces arrived from the Sick Children’s Hospital, Toronto.