by Shelley Wood
Rev. D. Routhier, Corbeil parish priest, announced this morning that a contract with the Tour Bureau, Chicago, at a meeting in Orillia yesterday, to exhibit the family at the World’s Fair, had been signed by Oliva Dionne, the father of the quintuplets. Father Routhier accompanied Dionne to Orillia.
The contract stipulates that the attending physician must first declare the mother and children ready to travel. It specifies that if nothing happens to the children and it is not too late for the fair, the Tour Bureau will provide special transportations for the entire family, including the grandfather, doctor, nurse, and assume all cost of the trip to Chicago, including salaries of the attendants. The contract will provide $250 weekly during the time of the exhibit, including expenses, and 20% of all receipts. Father Routhier of Corbeil Parish will be entitled to 7% of the earnings.
Until such time as the family can be moved, Dionne is to receive $100 weekly.
GOVERNMENT TAKE HAND
A true Canadian atmosphere was thrown on the situation today when the Ontario government stepped in and offered to make arrangements for all services, working with the Children’s Aid Society.
Told of the contract Dionne had signed, Dr. Dafoe was glad to hear that the family would get some much-needed money, but said it would be unwise to move the babies within three months, adding “their condition and progress govern the entire matter.”
“I was delighted,” stated Dr. Dafoe, “when I read the interest the Ontario Government were taking and they are helping in every way possible.”
Used with permission.
June 1, 1934
I was dressed for school and seated at the table when Father read the news in the Nugget about M. Dionne signing the deal to display the babies at the Chicago World’s Fair. We’d already bickered over Father’s insistence that I go to school today, the last day before exams. I’ve spent every day this week at the Dionne farmhouse and wanted to go straight back out there today, but he put his foot down. I truly don’t see the point of it. I have no real friends or teachers I want to say goodbye to and I’ve never been a good student. All I’ve ever wanted to do is read and draw. Perhaps if we’d stayed in Ottawa and I still had art class on my report card, I’d have at least one decent grade to please my parents. I have no head for maths, history, or geography, and I will do miserably on those exams—another disappointment for Father. But he long ago gave up on me doing anything further with my schooling, so it’s ridiculous he insisted on me going back for these last few days.
However, the news about the Dionnes in the paper startled us all into talking again. Father read it out loud and I gasped. Everyone who comes into the post office still grouses to Father about paying two cents instead of one for a postage stamp, so an income of $250 a week is unimaginable. And M. Dionne is already doing better than many farmers in our area. He grows food for his table and owns his own truck, something almost no one else in Corbeil could boast, or Callander for that matter. But I knew he’d also been frantic about all of the supplies and medical people filling his home. This offer must have seemed like a windfall.
“The Catholic priest appears to be in on the deal.” Father snorted, snapping the paper. Father has little time for religion of any stripe. “‘Father Routhier of Corbeil Parish will be entitled to seven percent of the earnings,’” he read from the paper.
Mother was shocked. “But, Emma, surely those tiny babies won’t survive a trip to Chicago, will they?”
The story in the Nugget also said two of the babies had nearly died in the night and had stabilized only after oxygen tanks arrived from Toronto. It was almost unbearable going to school, knowing two of the babies were in danger, but I knew I’d catch it from Father if I didn’t.
As soon as the final bell rang, I pedaled straight out to the farmhouse. The crowds have tripled in size, with at least forty cars and trucks lining the road that runs between Callander and Corbeil. Several men and women along a makeshift fence were waving newspapers and shouting at M. Dionne senior, who was still pacing the front of the property, now in the company of a local constable. I wriggled my way to the gate with difficulty and managed to attract the attention of Grandpapa Dionne, who let me through.
“There you are, thank goodness,” Ivy said, opening the door a mere gap, grasping my arm, and pulling me in. Her eyes were heavy, her expression pinched, and her uniform smudged and wilted. The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke, kerosene, and the sour tang of hot work.
“Have you even gone home?” I asked.
She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m going later today. Dr. Dafoe has organized for full-time help from the Red Cross. They should be here tonight.”
I went first to the babies in the canopied box by the fire, Yvonne and Annette. They were tiny as ever, their little fists stirring the air like sewing bobbins, toes like raisins. I crossed the room to the incubator and peered through the glass. Cécile, Marie, and Émilie were no better off, wriggling weakly against one another in their wooden den. A tall cylindrical tank, which I guessed to be the new oxygen supply, stood by the box, a hose snaking into a fixture on its side.
“We almost lost Marie last night.” Ivy sighed. “She stops breathing within three minutes when she’s out of the incubator. We’re giving her rum in her milk every two hours to stimulate her heart, but she is hanging by a thread. Cécile is not much better off.”
I started washing the kettles, pots, and a growing mound of soiled cottons. Claudette, the local girl who’d been hired to help, had not yet come in. “She’s terrified of M. Dionne, I’ve noticed,” Ivy said glumly. “God knows what he said to her. I sent her to fetch him from the stables last night when Mme. Dionne was asking for him, but he took forever to come in, and said he’d sent Claudette home.”
Not too much later, Dr. Dafoe arrived, bobbing up the steps like a cork in water. He had with him a handsome, imposing woman he introduced as Nurse Louise de Kiriline—Scandinavian, I gather, although her French is impeccable. She has large, pronounced teeth, unruly dark hair, and eyes that are such a deep shade of brown it’s difficult to discern her pupils, giving her a very tense and hungry look. Her eyebrows, thick and pointy, are set quite high up her forehead, as if they, too, are irked and a little bewildered by the intensity of her expression.
Dr. Dafoe gathered Nurse Clouthier, Ivy, me, and the orderly, Mrs. Nells, and said in no uncertain terms that the quintuplets had no chance of surviving if we did not create some new rules.
“I am Boss Number One,” he said in a booming voice, loud enough for Mme. Dionne to hear it, along with anyone else who might have been upstairs at the time. “Nurse de Kiriline is Boss Number Two. Her rules are my rules and must be followed.”
With Nurse de Kiriline at his side, Dr. Dafoe examined the babies one by one, making little clucking sounds.
“Completely identical,” he told her, and showed her the ribbons tied around the right ankle of each baby, labeled with the first letter of her name. “To avoid any possible confusion,” he said.
This made me smile. They all looked similar, of course, but there was no way I could have confused any one of them for another. To me they were so easily distinguishable, not only by their tiny quirks—Annette’s eyes, Marie’s hair—but even their little cries. If you listened properly, you could hear it.
Dr. Dafoe departed shortly thereafter, and Nurse de Kiriline swept into action.
“These”—she pointed at the heavy drapes in the sitting room off the kitchen—“these must go.”
Mme. Dionne is still poorly, but at her insistence had been moved upstairs to her own bed the previous evening. Now the bed used for her confinement was taken apart and rebuilt into additional shelving in the kitchen to hold the medical supplies, baby clothes, and linens that had been steadily arriving from various cities in Ontario, Quebec, and south of the border. A sideboard, a couch, and an upholstered chair were all pushed against a far wall, and the wide-plank pine table that had clearly been put to considerable use by the large Dionne
family was repurposed as a changing table in the middle of the kitchen, now dubbed the nursery. The heavy curtains gone, Nurse de Kiriline had us pin muslin netting tightly against the open windows to supply a steady breeze and keep out the clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes. We hung another white sheet in the open doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room, which Nurse de Kiriline declared a charting space for the nursing staff. Any vases, trivets, crucifixes, and figurines—anything not appropriate or usable for either an office or a nursery—were sent upstairs or out to the dusty porch.
When the heavy work was done, we took hot water and Lysol and scrubbed the floors, walls, and ceilings. By the time Dr. Dafoe returned, later in the day, his breast puffed out like a robin’s, to inform us that another incubator was on its way from Toronto, the Dionne farmhouse had been transformed. M. Dionne, presumably skulking around with a hundred-dollar check burning a hole in his pocket, was nowhere to be seen.
“You.” Nurse de Kiriline pointed at me as I helped Ivy oil the babies. In the long hours we’d been reorganizing the farmhouse, she had yet to say a word to me. “You are not a nurse, I gather. An orderly?”
“No,” I told her, blushing. “Dr. Dafoe has asked me to help out because I speak French and English.”
In fact, it was Ivy who had repeatedly asked me to stay and help, although I was mostly there of my own accord.
“I was here at the birth,” I added.
Nurse de Kiriline nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I’m happy to have your help,” she said briskly, then turned away.
Sometime late in the afternoon, Grandpapa Dionne knocked at the nursery door to say that the incubator had arrived, brought by several reporters from the Toronto Star. I’d been scrubbing the walls of the sitting room, but I drifted into the kitchen to see the contraption.
Ivy, I realized, had little interest in what was being wrestled from the back of a cream-and-maroon-colored Buick. Sure enough, one of the men was the newspaper photographer Fred Davis.
The men had to partly dismantle the incubator to fit it through the door. Since we had no electricity, engineers at the University of Toronto had rigged it to run off of a noisy diesel-powered generator behind the house, with long cords coiling through the window and across the kitchen floor.
Once it was reconstructed, we settled Annette, Yvonne, and Cécile into the new device, leaving Marie and Émilie in their own sealed nest. Ivy, meanwhile, took a jug of water to the Toronto newspapermen outside. The two reporters were badgering Grandpapa Dionne, asking him to track down Oliva Dionne so they could ask him some questions about the Chicago deal. Fred Davis, however, was leaning against a post on the porch grinning broadly at something Ivy was saying. She was smiling, too, the lopsided smile she’d use when she was trying to hide her crooked teeth, although at one point I saw her tip her head back and have a proper laugh. When I peeked out again, Ivy was leaning against one of the wooden struts, her arms akimbo, and Mr. Davis, having stepped down into the yard, was taking photos of her, one after another. I couldn’t see her face.
After a short while, Ivy came back inside, Fred Davis with her, and Dr. Dafoe agreed that Mr. Davis could take a picture of Ivy and Nurse de Kiriline holding two of the babies. Just then, M. Dionne burst through the front doors, fetched by his father, no doubt, from wherever he’d been lurking. The younger Dionne was holding a rolled document in one hand, batting it through the air like a truncheon, and shouting in French that photographs were prohibited. Dr. Dafoe drew himself up, his stout chest swelling manfully.
“Where is your gratitude, sir? These gentlemen have brought a new incubator for the quintuplets,” he said in English, looking sternly at the angry farmer. “This is your best chance of keeping the babies alive.” Fred Davis had his camera in both hands, raised to his chest, looking like he might at any minute start snapping shots of this altercation. I saw Ivy lay a hand on his forearm, and a look passed between them. He rolled his eyes but lowered the camera again and replaced the cap on the lens.
M. Dionne clearly understood what he’d just heard but barreled on, opening the papers he was carrying and thrusting the document toward our Toronto visitors.
“My babies!” he continued in French. “My rights.” Spittle flew from his lips. “All photographic rights now belong to Chicago, to Mr. Spears.”
Could he hear how he sounded? The idea that the Star photographers couldn’t take a single picture of the babies after driving all the way up here with what looked to be a very expensive piece of equipment—it seemed ludicrous. And Dr. Dafoe himself was working around the clock to save the babies while their own father was preoccupied with their profitability! Now, through clenched teeth, M. Dionne was growling at the Star men to leave the premises, “or else.” They retreated down the steps, and M. Dionne, still bristling like a hedgehog, sat himself on the porch to make sure they didn’t return.
Close to nightfall, the crickets chirring, Ivy and I set out to walk back to Callander. It felt like the first spring evening to truly carry the promise of summer. You could smell the lilacs in the breeze and hear the birds quibbling with their young to get them settled for the night.
Ivy was nearly falling asleep on her own feet but insisted she needed the walk and the fresh air. As we made our way along, she told me about why she’d wanted to be a nurse and how her father had managed to save up the money for her to attend the new nursing school in North Bay.
She was curious about what I was planning to do after graduating from high school in a few weeks’ time. Even the bulrushes lining the road seemed to lean in to hear my answer.
“No firm plans,” I admitted. “Mother wants me to become a midwife, but I don’t think that’s for me. A teacher, maybe. I’d love to teach art or literature. I love books.” In fact, I didn’t have the grades to train as a teacher, but I needed to say something.
“Well, I’m going to marry a Hollywood film star that I’ll meet after nursing him back to health after a film stunt and we’ll have five babies and live in California,” Ivy said.
“Oh?” I said. I’m not used to jokes and banter, so it took me a moment to realize she wasn’t delirious with fatigue. “Why not settle for a famous newspaper photographer and abscond with these quintuplets?” Ivy pretended to look shocked at the suggestion, but she couldn’t keep from smiling.
We were just a half mile outside of Callander when we heard the cough and chug of a vehicle making its way up the road behind us. With the price of gasoline where it is, trucks are relative rarities in our part of the world, and you can often catch a ride if the driver doesn’t have a load. Ivy and I took a moment to recognize the man at the wheel. M. Dionne slowed to pass us but didn’t stop, merely touching his fingers to his cap and carrying on by.
June 2, 1934 (Toronto Star)
* * *
FEAR ONE OF QUINTUPLETS IS NEAR DEATH
Father Strives to Break Contract to Show Tots in Chicago
CORBEIL, Ontario—Marie, the most delicate of the Dionne quintuplets, had a bad night. Her heart action was weak and about 4am today it seemed as though it might stop altogether. Fears are felt for her life.
“I was afraid for a little while something was going to happen to her,” Marie Clouthier, the nurse in charge, told the Star. “She got so blue we had to give her a little rum as a stimulant.”
Today Dr. Dafoe emerged from the home after his early visit minus the smile that was so evident yesterday. “They are still all alive,” he said. “That’s about all I can say. They are so awfully small. Every time I see them they seem even smaller. They are the tiniest babies I have ever seen live.”
All children were fed throughout the night, at two-hour intervals, human milk obtained by the Canadian Red Cross Society.
Dr. Dafoe will charge the Dionne family just $15 for delivering the quintuplets. This fee will include the ever-watchful care and the many calls at the three-roomed farmhouse made by the tireless country doctor in his so-far successful fight to keep life in the five infants.
Meantime Oliva Dionne, the father, is making strenuous efforts to break the contract which may eventually put his wife and babes on public view in the main lane of Chicago’s world fair midway. On Thursday, Dionne travelled 133 miles to Orillia and signed his first contract. Today he sent his first telegram. It implored Ivan Spears, sideshow maestro, to relieve him of the option taken on his babes. The answer was quick to flash back: “Nothing doing: you are signed to a legal document.”
Offers continue to pour in on the bewildered father and his padre manager. No sooner had they signed the Spear’s [sic] option than telegrams of astonished protest came from near and far. At the same time, a Chicago night club operator wired an offer guaranteeing a minimum of $500 a week with all expenses and offering to post a $10,000 cash bond with any bank named if mother and babes could be persuaded to bed down in his joy cave for 20 weeks. They were not persuaded.
Used with permission.
June 29, 1934
Nothing is happening by halves these days, not the birth of the quintuplets, not summer, which rushed headlong to meet spring so fast the smelly swarms of shad flies have already come and gone. There was scarcely time for the bees to buzz about the blossoms before the strawberries were out and not a single quiet moment for me to write things down. I feel like I blinked and the wind turned the page on my own life and now I’m in a completely different chapter.
All through my exams I kept going out to the farmhouse whenever I could, hardly making any effort to do well on my tests. The babies have filled out considerably this month but are still tiny and frail. Dr. Dafoe has appreciated my help, I think, and the other nurses, for the most part, are treating me as if I’ve come with the territory, which indeed I did.
Last week Ivy, who could coax a whisker from a cat, convinced Nurse de Kiriline to pay me two dollars a week as a part-time “nurse’s assistant,” and Dr. Dafoe has agreed. He’s said that there must be two staff on duty at all times, around the clock, so there’s plenty need for me when one of the nurses, orderlies, or housekeepers requires a few hours off.