by Sarah Miller
Now that their ignorance had made things worse, they wanted him to hurry. And, of course, he would.
* * *
—
The doctor was already too late. Around ten past four, Elzire’s baby was born.
Between them, Auntie Legros and Madame Lebel had delivered hundreds of babies, but the size of this infant left the two midwives terror-stricken. Arms barely bigger around than sticks of chalk, and every bit as breakable. Fingers that seemed too tiny to contain bones at all. Bruise-colored skin so thin and tender, it might as well have been cellophane. Lamplight glanced off the shining outline of her delicate ribs. The whole of the baby’s torso fit within Madame Lebel’s palm; a bulbous head the size of a small orange wobbled on a frail neck. Like an insect’s, her head and belly were entirely out of proportion with her long, spindly limbs. Everything about the tiny little girl looked raw and unfinished, with one startling exception: a beautiful set of long black eyelashes.
She was not breathing.
The midwives rubbed her back and chest and blew into her mouth, desperate to inflate her lungs. Precious seconds ticked by as the two women struggled to make her live without injuring her impossibly fragile body. Suddenly a mewling sound rose from the thin blue lips.
A moment’s exultation, then the realization: a child so small could not live more than a few minutes. Auntie Legros dashed to the kitchen pump for a dipper of water. “Ego te baptizo in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti,” she murmured as she sprinkled the water over the child’s silky dark hair. I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. They could do no more than that. The midwives tied off the cord with a length of cotton thread from Elzire’s sewing basket, wrapped the baby in a torn bit of wool blanket warmed before the oven door, and laid her near her mother, certain that death was imminent for one or both of them.
Within minutes, Elzire’s pains returned. But instead of the afterbirth, out came another baby girl, smaller yet than the first. Again Auntie Legros and Madame Lebel persuaded the baby to breathe. Immediately they baptized her, too, and laid her next to her sister, who, miraculously, was also still breathing.
Madame Legros and Auntie Lebel had no time to congratulate themselves before yet another infant’s head began to emerge. Not twins, but triplets! At almost the same moment, Dr. Dafoe arrived. “Good God, woman, put on some more hot water!” he exclaimed as he headed to scrub up in the kitchen basin.
The third baby, delivered by the midwives before the doctor had taken his coat off, was even smaller, even more reluctant to breathe than her sisters. Undaunted, Dr. Dafoe and the two women worked her over until they coaxed her into making that strange but encouraging mewling. Auntie Legros baptized her, and she joined the widening row of dark-haired baby girls at the foot of the bed.
By now Elzire was so exhausted, she appeared to be unconscious. What little of her strength remained, she devoted to pressing her rosary beads to her heart and praying silently to herself. She desperately needed rest. But her body had not finished its work.
“My God, there are still more there,” Madame Lebel said to the doctor.
“Gosh!” he exclaimed. Realizing that Elzire had become too weak to bring yet another child into the world without assistance, Dafoe put “a little pressure” on her abdomen, and a fourth baby made its way into the lamplight. “Gosh!” he said again as a fifth followed two minutes later.
Through the transparent walls of the unbroken amniotic sacs, Dafoe could see arms and legs moving: two more miniature baby girls, these the smallest of all. In his sleepy state, the scene was “unreal and dreamlike,” he remembered, “but I mechanically went about the business of looking after the babies.”
Madame Lebel and Auntie Legros were every bit as stunned. Five babies in a single hour! “We just looked at each other with amazement,” Auntie Legros recalled of the fifth birth. And the last two were born in “angel veils”—an uncommon sign of good luck. It was clear from their size that this pair would need every ounce of luck imaginable.
Quickly, Dr. Dafoe ruptured the sacs and got the last two babies breathing. Auntie Legros baptized them. (Or perhaps it was the doctor. Maybe both—certainly both remembered doing so.) Madame Lebel swaddled the infants in napkins and sheets and laid them alongside the first three. Then a warmed blanket was spread over all five babies.
“Auntie, have I twins, this time?” Elzire asked.
“Yes, my dear,” Madame Lebel answered, “twins and three more.” She held up her fingers and counted off five daughters—“Cinq fillettes.”
Elzire burst into tears. “What will I do with all them babies?” she wailed.
* * *
—
Satisfied that the birth was finally over, Auntie Legros ran home for supplies. Into a butcher’s basket went an old woolen blanket, a bottle of olive oil, and some flatirons. When she returned, everything had changed. Elzire had gone into shock. She was cold to the touch. Her fingertips were black, her pulse nearly imperceptible. Frightened, Auntie Legros called the doctor in from the yard.
Dr. Dafoe injected Elzire with pituitary hormone to raise her blood pressure, and ergot solution to slow any internal bleeding. A little color appeared in her face. Her pulse quickened, but not enough to bring her out of danger. For forty-five minutes, Auntie Legros and the doctor worked to keep her from slipping away. When Elzire looked no better, Auntie Legros told Dafoe it was time to send for the priest. Dafoe agreed—he had been thinking the same thing.
Auntie Legros went out to the living room, where Oliva was pacing the floor. “My God, what am I going to do with five babies!” he exclaimed, just as Elzire had done. In the space of an hour his family had doubled, leaving his wife on the verge of death. He felt as though he had been “punched.” The news put Oliva in such a frantic state of nerves, Auntie Legros did not trust him behind the wheel. Instead, it was Dr. Dafoe who left Elzire’s bedside and sped off to Corbeil to alert Father Routhier. There was not much else Dafoe could do for her.
Elzire had watched the doctor’s face and heard his grave tone as he spoke with the midwives in English. She did not need to understand the words to guess what he was telling them. Elzire had never felt so feeble and helpless in all her life. She tried to say Oliva’s name. She wanted to touch her babies once while they were still living. But she was too weak to speak, too weak to lift her hand.
* * *
—
In the time it took Dafoe to return, Elzire had rallied somewhat. He left a prescription for her and instructed the midwives to administer it if she had any more pains. He had done everything he knew how to do. If that was not enough, the priest would be along soon.
“As we did not anticipate his return, I asked Dr. Dafoe what to do with the babies,” Madame Lebel recalled. In all the commotion over Elzire, hardly anyone had given a thought to the five infants at the foot of the bed. Every last one of the “little mites” was still living.
“All we can do is to keep them warm and quiet,” Dafoe answered. “Leave ’em alone, except to give them a few drops of warm water every couple of hours—if they live.”
What about bathing them in warm olive oil? Madame Lebel wondered.
“He told her to please herself,” Auntie Legros remembered, “as he did not think there was much use in her troubling herself a great deal as the babies would all die.” Perhaps the biggest one might have a chance, he conceded, but certainly not the others. No set of quintuplets had ever lived before, and he had no reason to hold out hope for these five. Twenty-six years earlier, Dafoe had assisted at the birth of a set of quadruplets; all four were dead within a week. “However, you can please yourself,” he repeated.
Madame Lebel warmed flatirons on the stove. The midwives positioned two chairs before the open oven door and balanced the basket across the two seats while one at a time they sponged each of the infants with warm
olive oil. Careful to preserve the order in which they had been born, Madame Lebel and Auntie Legros arranged the babies in the butcher’s basket from biggest to smallest.
By the time Oliva came in to see his five daughters for the first time, they were back in the basket on the foot of their mother’s bed, with hot flatirons propped near their toes and a big wool blanket draped over the top.
Elzire lay watching as her husband approached on tiptoe, hesitating in the bedroom doorway. His brown-black eyes were red from crying. She knew what kind of tragedy or sorrow it took to bring Oliva Dionne to tears. “Realizing this, near death as I was,” Elzire remembered, “I made up my mind to be as brave as possible. So when Oliva grasped my hand and asked me how I felt I replied: ‘Not too bad.’ ”
Oliva glanced at the butcher’s basket. Then he took a few steps to the end of the bed. Elzire watched him stare into the basket. She could not guess his feelings. He looked sheepish, embarrassed, bewildered.
“What do you think of…of…” Elzire stammered. She could not bring herself to say our five babies. It still seemed too much. “…of them?” she finished.
Oliva did not take his eyes from the basket. “I don’t know what to think, Elzire,” he answered slowly, “for the unheard of has just happened to us, hasn’t it? But I do know that I never could have imagined any babies so small. Aren’t they the tiniest things to be alive and breathing?”
“They’re still alive and breathing, all five of them?”
“Yes,” Oliva answered, “I’m watching them breathe.”
It was a miracle, she decided. A miracle from on high. That was the only way Elzire could explain it to herself. But already Elzire knew better than to expect anyone else to see it the same way.
“What will people say when they find out about this?” she wondered aloud. Only animals gave birth in such numbers. “They will say we are pigs.”
News of the extraordinary birth began to spread the moment Dr. Dafoe stepped from the Dionnes’ porch. When he spotted Oliva’s brother, Leon Dionne, driving up to the barnyard to collect a load of manure for his garden, Dafoe did not miss the opportunity to inform Leon he’d just become an uncle again, five times over. To Leon Dionne it seemed “either a mighty joke on Oliva, or else the worst kind of hard luck.”
Dr. Dafoe was not nearly done reveling in the astonishment. Down at the post office in Callander, he teased the postmistress, “Saw something this morning you never saw.”
She was used to his jokes and stories. “You’re always seeing things I’ve never seen, Doctor,” she scoffed.
“No, I mean something real. I’ve just seen five babies.”
“Goodness me! Did you have five cases last night?”
“No, I m-m-mean five babies from one mother,” Dafoe boasted, finally taking her by surprise.
“Say, that’s something!” she exclaimed.
(Some bystanders that morning claimed to remember hearing him call the Dionne babies “five little French frogs.” It was an insult—frog was, and still is, a derogatory term for a French person—and one the Dionne family would not forgive.)
In the sort of happenstance that occurs only in the smallest of towns, Dafoe also crossed paths with the babies’ grandfather Olivier Dionne as he left the post office. “Did you know you are the grandfather of five new babies?” the doctor asked.
The old French Canadian was as thunderstruck as anyone else. The number was preposterous, the date too soon. “What do you mean—five baby?”
“Why, Oliva’s wife has just had five little girls. They’re all still living—but I don’t think they can m-m-make it.”
“Mon Dieu!” Grandpa Dionne cried. My God! “What will my poor son do?”
Dafoe told a store clerk, too, who thought the doctor ought to call the newspapers. There Dafoe drew the line. It wouldn’t be quite professional, he decided. Businesslike again, he went home and made the world’s tersest record of the birth in his journal: “Oliva Dionne—5F.”
But it turned out that Uncle Leon Dionne had already snatched up the chance to tantalize the papers with his family’s remarkable news when he rang up Eddie Bunyan, editor of the nearest paper, the North Bay Nugget.
“How much would it cost to run a birth notice in the paper announcing the birth of five babies at one time?” he asked. Would it be more than the usual fee for just one?
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you, Leon?” Bunyan asked.
The question sounded like a joke, but the news itself, Bunyan soon discovered, was absolutely authentic. Bunyan got the details, assured Uncle Leon that there would be no charge at all, and whipped off a dispatch on the Canadian Wire Service:
North Bay, May 28th:—Mrs. Oliva Dionne, residing within a few miles of Callander, nine miles south of here, gave birth to five girls today. All were healthy, said Dr. A. R. Dafoe, Callander attending physician. Mrs. Dionne is 24 and had previously given birth to six children.
The story continued to whirl just as quickly through Callander, spreading by word of mouth. One four-year-old boy came running home from school to beg his mother to get him one of the Dionnes’ babies. There were so many, he was afraid they might be drowned, the way folks sometimes drowned kittens when there were too many to feed. Yvette Boyce, a schoolgirl at the time, heard the news from a friend who lived near the Dionnes. “We couldn’t believe it. Five babies—one mother? So away we went.” The two girls trudged a mile to peep at the babies through the back window. “It was fabulous!”
By midmorning, a reporter and a photographer from the Nugget had arrived at the Dionne farmhouse. Auntie Legros let the two Nugget men inside and, in disregard of Dr. Dafoe’s advice to avoid unnecessary handling, allowed them to arrange the five newborns on the bed beside Elzire for a photo. They were barely six hours old. Dafoe’s injections and a visit from her priest had apparently done Elzire a world of good; the newsmen could hardly tell she’d been on the verge of death only a few hours before. As the camera flashed, she laughed and joked with the midwives. Mindful of the physical ordeal she had just endured and limited by their own lack of French, the visitors troubled Elzire no further.
With Oliva, they were not as sympathetic. The reporters met him just as he walked in from the morning chores. Oliva, who could only have been surprised to find two strangers emerging from his bedroom, obliged them at first. They wanted to know the babies’ weights, so he found an old potato scale and helped measure his new daughters, again overriding Dr. Dafoe’s recommendation to “leave ’em alone.” The biggest registered 3 pounds, 4 ounces; the smallest, a pound less. Together the five little girls totaled 13 pounds, 6 ounces.
“Well, do you feel proud of yourself?” the Nugget reporter wanted to know. Something about the question, or perhaps the way the man asked it, touched a nerve. It struck Oliva as just the kind of insult Elzire had feared—as though the reporter were implying there was something dirty or shameful in having more than one child at a time.
“The way you talk, people would think I ought to be put in jail,” he retorted. At least, that is what Oliva Dionne forever insisted he’d said. What the Nugget printed was “I’m the kind of fellow they should put in jail,” introducing him to the entire world as though he were indeed ashamed of himself. The offense Oliva took from that single question and answer would taint his dealings with the media for the rest of his life.
The photo the Nugget snapped of Oliva that morning was only a little more flattering. He sat, brow furrowed and gaze fixed dazedly ahead, with Pauline in his lap, holding Daniel by the arm. Ernest, Thérèse, and Rose-Marie looked warily over his shoulder at the camera. “He had not slept all night and had not thought to shave,” his children remembered. “His thick, dark hair was uncombed, his eyes were tense, his lean face was gray with fatigue and concern.”
That was the world’s first glimpse of Papa Dionne, as he came to be called in the papers:
a small, disheveled man on the verge of hysteria. The very idea that this thin, nervous young farmer had it in him to father five children all at once struck the public as though it were a joke. As with most first impressions, it would prove difficult to shake.
* * *
—
Unbeknownst to anyone at the Dionne farm, the five newborns were still very much on Dr. Dafoe’s mind. He had told everyone that they could not possibly live, yet almost immediately he began taking steps to assure that they might at least have a fighting chance to survive. By nine-thirty that first morning he was at the Red Cross outpost in Bonfield, ten miles south of Callander. If those babies were going to make it, they needed a nurse—ideally one who spoke both French and English fluently. French-speakers were very much in the minority in Ontario, but as luck would have it, Dafoe knew a newly graduated bilingual nurse personally. Before the day was out, the Red Cross had enlisted twenty-one-year-old Yvonne Leroux. The daughter of Callander’s only taxi driver, Nurse Leroux had grown up just two doors down from Dr. Dafoe.
“I’m so tired I could drop,” she’d jotted in her daybook at three o’clock that afternoon at the hospital in North Bay. “Two septic and two lung cases.” Then, added at the bottom of the page: “Out to country on case—wonder what it is.”