The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  “Feels good, eh?” he said.

  Yvonne did not answer. Émilie’s gaze met hers over Oliva’s shoulder and Yvonne closed her eyes. Oliva’s back was to Émilie; Yvonne knew her sister could not see the way their father’s hands moved farther down Yvonne’s torso and lingered where they had no need or right to be.

  “I’m getting cold,” Yvonne said, and crossed the sleeves of her pajama top over her chest.

  “Your turn, Émilie,” Oliva said.

  * * *

  —

  That was not the sisters’ only memory of Oliva violating them. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie soon came to dread riding in the car with their father. The back seat of the Cadillac had been removed for repairs, forcing Oliva’s passengers to squeeze into the front and putting the girls in easy reach.

  “Who wants to go with Dad for a drive?” Elzire would call outside after supper. Cécile knew what would happen to Émilie and Marie if they went with him. Her father had taken her by surprise with a French kiss during one of those rides. “I was afraid for them. I said, ‘I’ll go.’ ”

  It happened to Annette, too, during a driving lesson. “He put his finger into my blouse. I was thirteen; it was 1947. I froze, unable to speak. He said, ‘You don’t like that, eh?’ ” For two years after that, Annette hid herself beneath turtlenecks, no matter the season or the weather.

  When Oliva drove fifteen-year-old Yvonne to the family’s cottage on Trout Lake and instructed her to do something unthinkable, Yvonne had the courage to refuse. Ever after, Yvonne managed to dodge her father’s advances. “I always saw when something was coming,” she said.

  Émilie was not so lucky. Cécile recalled coming across her sister huddled in a corner of the basement, hugging her knees to her chest with a Chopin record muffling the sounds of her sobs. Émilie would not say what was wrong, but when Cécile asked, Dad? Émilie sobbed harder. “It’s over, Émilie, it’s past,” Cécile soothed.

  Silently, Cécile vowed that it would not happen again. Ever. “We must never leave Em all alone when we are here,” she told Yvonne, Annette, and Marie later. “One of us must keep an eye on her twenty-four hours a day. Understood?”

  “Me neither,” Marie implored; “don’t leave me all alone.”

  * * *

  —

  Before falling asleep each night, Annette imagined “going downstairs at night, without making a sound. I take the key in the kitchen and I go outside. I talk softly to the dogs so they won’t bark. I go to the fence, open the lock, and there I am, on the road.” She did not share this fantasy with her sisters. “Oh, no,” she said with a rueful laugh. “That was private.”

  Decades later, when the others learned of Annette’s urge to flee, they expressed a touching mixture of support and concern for her safety. “It would have been very difficult because we were closely watched,” Yvonne said. “I don’t know how she could have made it.”

  “I think I would tell her not to try it because I was already so afraid,” Cécile reflected of her younger self. “But now, at my age I would say, Yes—go on!”

  All of them recognized that it had been an impossible daydream. “First of all, I didn’t know where to go,” Annette said. “And the fence was very high.”

  “And sharp,” Cécile added.

  * * *

  —

  Instead, Annette summoned the fortitude to confide in the chaplain of Villa Notre Dame, Father Bélanger. He listened with his “customary calm,” hands clasped behind his back, shaking his head and keeping his eyes lowered as they walked across the school grounds. Yet Annette’s relief at unburdening herself was quickly smothered by the realization that the priest had no solution to offer.

  Nor would Father Bélanger intervene, even when Annette asked him outright to speak with Oliva. Annette had no way of knowing that her secret was not entirely a surprise to the priest, or that the clergy at Villa Notre Dame already felt trapped in an impossible position. “These sisters, the nuns, lived through hell in there,” Sister Tremblay, a fellow member of the Sisters of the Assumption, said later. “They saw what the family did to the quints and couldn’t do anything about it.” Émilie had already confided in one of her teachers that Elzire did not love her. The same woman had also heard from Yvonne that “her father loved her only ‘when interested for other reasons.’ ” As much as this knowledge disturbed them, the nuns did not dare put the girls’ only safe haven at risk by telling what they knew. “They would have been fired, and it would be worse at home for the girls,” Sister Tremblay concluded after speaking with the staff of Villa Notre Dame.

  Father Bélanger wrestled with the same dilemma. “Even if we are not in the confessional, I must keep your secret,” he told Annette. “What you tell me, I don’t have the right to repeat.”

  When she asked what they should do, he replied, “Continue to respect your father. ‘Thou shalt honor thy father and mother…’ It’s a commandment. Pray and have faith in divine providence.”

  “But the car trips?”

  “Wear thick coats,” Father Bélanger advised. “I’ll pray for you.”

  It would be decades before Annette and her sisters risked speaking out again.

  They did not tell their mother, or their siblings. When news of their allegations broke some fifty years later, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Pauline, Oliva Jr., Victor, and Claude (the youngest Dionne child, born in 1946) were thunderstruck. “We assert that we had good parents,” Thérèse said on behalf of herself and her surviving siblings, “and that to our knowledge our father was certainly not a sexual abuser.” Victor termed his sisters’ claims “a lot of trash,” adding, “There is no way we agree with what they’ve said.”

  Although Thérèse, like most of her siblings, had spent months at a time away from home at boarding schools in Ottawa and Quebec, it still struck her as unimaginable that her five youngest sisters could have hidden such a monumental secret for decades. “How could it happen if no one else in the family was aware of it?” she asked. Nothing remotely similar had happened to her, to Rose-Marie, or to Pauline. “Never,” Thérèse declared.

  Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie did not confide in their schoolmates, either. Yet when Connie Vachon read the experiences her girlhood friends divulged about their father, it was as though feelings that had been too vague to call suspicions began to come into focus. “Is this why I was uncomfortable?” she asked herself. “Is this why I felt the tension?” Suddenly, Connie could imagine motivations behind the sisters’ behavior that had puzzled her as a teenager. “Is this why they didn’t want to be the one that went to the movies?” she wondered. None of them ever looked forward to their turn for a trip to the theater in North Bay with their father. “And I thought, you know, at the time, Gee, I would want to go to the movies, get out of the compound.” Time and again, their recollections stirred “many thoughts about those years.”

  “I do believe in the quints,” Connie decided.

  As the years passed, the pretty paintings that graced Brown & Bigelow’s popular Dionne Quintuplet calendars showed five carefree, indistinguishable brunettes sailing, camping, horseback riding, even telephoning boyfriends for dates. Little in the images bore any resemblance to Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s lives. Aside from a brief trip to New York City in 1950—their view hampered by an ever-present wall of police escorts, reporters, photographers, and gawkers—and an appearance at a winter carnival in Minnesota, the world beyond the gates of the Big House and Villa Notre Dame was still largely a blank to them.

  Books and movies gave the girls fleeting glimmers of how other people lived. Yvonne, a Bing Crosby fan, favored history books and wanted to visit Rome. “I like Shirley Temple best of all,” Annette told a reporter. She enjoyed reading novels and imagined visiting France one day. Cécile, too, liked the thought of seeing France. She was drawn to travel books
and Deanna Durbin films. Émilie preferred movie star Gloria Jean and “found much satisfaction” in the lives of the saints. Her first choice would be to visit the Holy Land. Marie, like Yvonne, dreamed of a trip to Rome. Short stories and Ingrid Bergman movies were her favorites.

  Newsreels showed the five girls in white caps and gowns smiling shyly as they stepped forward to receive their high school diplomas alongside their schoolmates in the spring of 1952. What Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie would do with those diplomas, however, was anybody’s guess. “I don’t remember the girls ever saying anything about what they would like to do,” said Connie Vachon. “I think they just wanted out of the compound.”

  Graduation itself did not reward the five sisters with any particular sense of accomplishment. “We had our new names as a private legacy to take away with us,” they said of their treasured nicknames, “but little more than that. As scholars, we had not distinguished ourselves. Five places near the bottom of the class were our usual achievement when examinations came around.” What they knew best was how to sing and perform skits, to make collages of religious images, and to embroider.

  “In that time,” Cécile explained, “there was only two choices: to be a nun or to get married.” Yet Cécile felt a pull toward nursing—a topic almost impossible to broach with her parents, who still harbored an intense mistrust of nurses and doctors. Nursing attracted Yvonne, too, though not as strongly. Annette’s love of music made her wonder if she could be a music teacher. Émilie knew only that she wanted to help people somehow. While her sisters flirted with the possibility of stretching their boundaries, Marie secretly contemplated a life of faith.

  * * *

  —

  Before any of them could decide which paths to choose, Oliva decided for them. He enrolled his five daughters at the Institut Familial, a small Catholic women’s college in Nicolet, Quebec.

  “When Dad told us that we had been enrolled at the Institut for the new school year, beginning in September, our spirits soared,” they remembered. “At long, long last we should be set free from seclusion and confinement. We five were going to be by ourselves again, happy in the company of each other, without the stresses and strains that family living seemed constantly to impose.”

  Fear tinged their excitement. The thought of being on their own in the world was wholly new and overwhelming. At night Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie lay awake wondering whether they would feel safe without fences, dogs, and police guards to protect them. What would happen if they were recognized on the streets of Nicolet? Could they possibly walk out together without causing a stir? Should they use different names? Cécile and Annette took it into their heads to dye their hair and ended up staining only their hands.

  When they arrived in Nicolet, the sisters immediately realized that the time they had spent worrying about such things had gone to waste. “Half pleased, half disappointed, we found that the pattern had changed only little,” they said.

  The Institut was run by the Sisters of the Assumption—the same order that staffed Villa Notre Dame. The Dionnes lived in a dorm with twenty other girls, much as they had that first year at Villa Notre Dame. The bulk of their classes mirrored what they had studied in high school: home economics, languages, music, elocution, literature, dietetics, and decorative arts. Cécile was relieved to be enrolled in a chemistry course she needed to enter nursing school, but the absence of any math classes troubled her. Physics, psychology, diction, and typing rounded out their academic schedule, but Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie found themselves spending most of their time refining skills like drawing, knitting, weaving, and singing. Just as at the Big House, a birthday or a visit from an honored guest was an excuse to pull them from classes to perform, or sing at funeral Masses for the clergy. The frequency of Émilie’s seizures made it doubly difficult for her to attend classes regularly.

  The feeling of being watched had followed them as well. “There was still that finger in the back to say ‘Sit up straight’ and ‘Behave yourselves.’ ” Any misstep, they sensed, could be reported to Oliva, who had left special instructions that hampered his daughters’ first chance at freedom. On Sunday, when the other girls went into town or welcomed visitors, the Dionne sisters were shut into a classroom, writing letters to their parents. This was their most taxing assignment of the week. “Dad was a great one for reading between the lines. The letters could not be too short, or he would feel slighted, nor too glib, or he would suspect we were keeping things from him, nor too gay, because he did not regard life as a matter for jokes.” (“Pat him on the back,” an acquaintance used to say of the girls’ notoriously hard-to-please father. “Never step on his toes.”) Each letter needed to contain precisely the right combination of love, gratitude, and homesickness. Appearing too happy to be away might wound their parents; too much pining for home risked bringing Oliva and Elzire to whisk them back to the Big House.

  There were unexpected liberties, too. Yvonne exulted in the feeling of finally letting down her guard for the first time in nine years. “I felt free like a bird,” Annette echoed. “That’s a part of my life I enjoyed and won’t forget. Never, never.” With no one to scold them for spending “too much” time together, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie reveled in one another’s company in a way they had not enjoyed since their nursery days. Secure in their sisterhood, each began to feel the freedom—and the desire—to express the individuality that had so long eluded them. “They saved us,” Yvonne said of the nuns at the Institut. “They were so good to us.”

  Yvonne and Cécile made a bold move late in the fall, daring to ask the nuns’ permission to go into town on Saturday afternoon rather than the forbidden Sunday. Remarkably, the answer was yes. The two did not go far, but the taste of the open world, free of photographers and fences, proved intoxicating.

  Visiting the local shops also alerted the sisters to the fact that compared with their schoolmates, their monthly allowance of $2 apiece was pathetic—enough to cover notebooks and pencils and nothing else. Too timid to ask Oliva for more, they brought up the problem with the Mother Superior. “The interview had us all trembling at the prospect of the trouble we feared we might be causing,” they said. “But the Mother Superior did what we dared not do. On our behalf, she asked Dad for more money. We were overjoyed to have our allowances raised to five dollars.”

  “You are rich enough to buy the entire college if you cared to,” she told them. The remark baffled Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. As far as they knew, every dime they spent came straight from their father’s pocket.

  “I have an announcement to make,” Marie told her parents and sisters on her nineteenth birthday. “I am going to enter a convent and serve God,” she said. “I have thought of it for a long time. I have prayed, and I have decided. I care nothing for the things of the world. I feel I belong in a convent. It is the only place where I can be happy.”

  Marie’s calm resolve astounded Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Émilie as much as the news itself. The frailest one among them, the sister they all called Peewee, was the first to take charge of her own life. She had not hinted or requested. She had not asked permission at all. With just two words—I am—Marie had informed her parents that the decision was already made.

  Does that mean I might be able to do what I want the most? Yvonne wondered.

  * * *

  —

  Marie’s chosen order was Les Servantes du Très Saint Sacrement—the Servants of the Blessed Sacrament—an order that brought to mind words such as strict, austere, and sheltered. Its members did not teach or minister to the poor. They devoted themselves to perpetual adoration of the Eucharist—praying for three-hour stretches in groups of two or three, twenty-four hours a day. When they were not praying, they sewed altar cloths and vestments for priests and made Communion bread. “I have chosen this particular order because it responds t
o my desire of loving God more intensely,” Marie told the press.

  To Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, and Émilie’s dismay, it was a cloistered order; once Marie professed her perpetual vows, she could not set foot outside the convent for any reason for the rest of her life. Visitors were permitted for just one hour each month, with a grille of thick wooden lattice separating Marie from her guests. When she died, Marie would be buried in the convent cemetery.

  “I am very grateful to all the people all over the world who prayed for my sisters and me when we were babies,” she explained to the press. “I want to return this faith from which we benefitted. From now on, all my prayers will be for them.” Marie did not mention that more than any of her sisters, she recoiled from the feel of strangers’ eyes upon her. In the convent, she would never again have to bear the scrutiny of the public.

  “How do you feel about being separated from your sisters?” a reporter wanted to know.

  “I will suffer greatly, but I will offer this sacrifice to God,” Marie replied.

  For her sisters, relinquishing Marie to the cloister was akin to a death among them. Émilie took it hardest of all. She would not ruin Marie’s happiness with her grief, but privately Émilie’s emotions ran so high at the very thought of parting with her mirror twin that Yvonne, Annette, and Cécile feared that her sorrow and anger would trigger a seizure. It was one thing for Marie to turn her back on the material world—a world none of them had experienced enough to truly miss. “But she’s letting go of us!” Émilie protested.