The Quintland Sisters

by Shelley Wood

  June 5, 1936

  Marie-Jeanne Lebel and Mme. Legros, the midwives who allowed me to stay the fateful night the quintuplets were born, have done the most astonishing thing. They have opened a souvenir stand just down the road toward Corbeil on a street-facing corner of the Legros property. Ivy convinced me to go and see it today. It is an enormous two-story structure with an open-air restaurant upstairs and shop on the bottom, topped with a sign that says MIDWIVES’ PAVILION: REFRESHMENTS AND SOUVENIRS FROM THE MIDWIVES OF THE DIONNE QUINTUPLETS.

  We wandered around the shop and gawked at all of the trinkets you can buy featuring our five babies. Etchings, postcards, spoons, cups, plates, bibs, baby bonnets and booties, tea towels, thimbles, hairbrushes, coasters, and candy bars, all of them adorned with the five faces of Annette, Yvonne, Cécile, Marie, and Émilie. They even had a slim pamphlet that they were selling for fifty cents detailing the night of the birth entitled “Administering Angels to the Dionne Quintuplets.”

  They both recognized us from that harrowing first week, but neither was particularly warm, although Mme. Lebel asked in her deep, minty voice about my mother and baby Edith. Neither of them is delivering babies anymore, they said. They are busy enough here, clearly, with all of the visitors stampeding through the doors.

  Back at the nursery, Dr. Dafoe summoned me to his office to tell me that he has arranged for a special account to be opened in my name and that the stipend I receive for my artwork for Mrs. Fangel is being paid directly into that, rather than being added to my regular pay. I suspect Dr. Dafoe knows that I’m sending my entire salary home to Mother and Father, who need every little bit for baby Edith, so the fact that he is keeping this money separate has given me mixed feelings. Of course, I can do with it as I please, he said. “But if these times have taught us anything, it’s that we should all have something set aside for a rainy day.”

  I can’t think what rainy days he envisions in my future. But for now, this is my little secret, perhaps the first real secret I’ve had from my parents. It makes me feel older than my years.

  Perhaps I should see about having Mme. Legros and Mme. Lebel sell some of my paintings in their shop. I bet they’d sell like hotcakes.

  July 2, 1936 (Toronto Star)

  * * *

  PUBLIC MAY NOW SEE QUINTUPLETS BUT NOT QUINTUPLETS THE PUBLIC

  NORTH BAY, Ontario—For the first time yesterday the quintuplets’ new playground at Callander with its surrounding circular passageway to enable the public to view the children without the children themselves being aware of the fact was opened for public inspection.

  Dr. A. R. Dafoe has been responsible for the construction of this unique children’s recreation field.

  In order to prevent the children being disturbed by the footsteps of visitors, the floor of the passageway will be covered with felt, over which will be laid cork linoleum. Inside the aluminium-sprayed wire screen will be sheets of glass to prevent the voices of the visitors carrying to the children.

  This latter precaution was decided upon by Dr. Dafoe yesterday afternoon after he had carefully observed sound and visibility conditions when the first visitors were admitted. In conjunction with the playground and opening out from the passageway itself will be a private boudoir for the babies where they can be dressed and dried after their activities in the wading pool.

  Used with permission.

  July 8, 1936

  Miss Emma Trimpany

  Dafoe Hospital and Nursery

  Callander, ON

  Dear Miss Trimpany,

  My father and I are hoping you might consider raising a delicate issue with Dr. Dafoe on our behalf. We’ve written to him ourselves, but I appreciate the good doctor receives a bushel of mail every day and our letter may have been lost in the shuffle.

  My father and I are now making two, sometimes three trips per day between the nursery and the lakeshore—I fear we are in danger of emptying Lake Nipissing’s beaches of stones once and for all. Indeed, we may be soon dredging the lake. It sounds improbable, but let me tell you: finding pebbles to fill the souvenir buckets at the Dafoe Nursery is becoming a considerable challenge. Our suggestion might be a sign reminding tourists to please restrict themselves to a single Quint-stone as a memento of their visit. In the past two years we estimate we have brought one and a half thousand tons of rocks and pebbles to the nursery and they have all disappeared into the pockets and purses of your many visitors, who take them God knows where. If I were Lake Nipissing, I might feel like someone was making off with the walls of my house. If the lake, set free, decides to take off after her stones, this will be a thirsty part of the world indeed.

  I’m making light of the matter, but would you consider raising this issue? Joking aside, my father and I feel the public should be urged to exercise some restraint with regard to the fertility stones, if not to spare the world a population spike, then at least to keep us from digging a new quarry. Maybe the hospital would consider charging a small fee per pebble that would help keep some of these stones in our neck of the woods for future generations.

  Yours respectfully,

  Lewis Cartwright

  25 Poplar Road

  Callander, ON

  July 10, 1936

  We are melting. For the third day in a row the heat has soared above one hundred degrees. We’ve finished choking down a cold supper for which none of us had the slightest appetite. I am too hot to work on my sketches; the pastels slip from my fingers like sticks of butter.

  Now that the sun is down, we’ve got the windows thrown open and fans whirring throughout the nursery to try to stir the soupy air. Nothing seems to help. The girls are cranky and restless and everything is Non-non-non-non, accompanied by much foot stamping and head shaking. Today, they peeled their dresses over their heads the minute we got them back inside from their outdoor play, and we resigned ourselves to letting them scamper around naked. We are trying to keep them cool with ice, constant fluids, and plenty of cool baths, but both Cécile and Annette have terrible heat rash and the others will no doubt get it too. Until this heat wave breaks, I think all of us will be crabbier than usual. Dr. Dafoe has wisely canceled the afternoon showing in the new playground until the heat abates: he believes it is simply not safe to have the girls outside. Even in the morning showings, we’ve had several ladies faint in the observation corridor, where it is hot as a furnace, with not a whisper of a draft. It’s got plenty of windows, of course, but they are useless in terms of fresh air, since they all look out onto the girls’ playground and can’t be opened. Plus they are coated in a dark mesh, which makes them even hotter.

  It took twice as long today to get the girls fed and dressed and their hair brushed and curled, only to have them look wilted within minutes. Their new playground is in shade for a few hours in the morning but gets very little in the way of a breeze, being surrounded by the walls of the viewing gallery on three sides and the entrance into the private playground and nursery on the other. Its saving grace is a wading pool, which all of the girls adore.

  It’s dreadful knowing that our every action there is on display. The babies don’t realize a thing, thank goodness, and have been delighted with their new playground. It has a swing set and teeter-totter, a large sandbox with every shape of pail and trowel, the wading pool, a large grassy area, and a track around the perimeter, where they can push and pull their vast collection of wagons and wheeled toys. As for us nurses, we feel like fish in a fishbowl although no one is the slightest bit interested in us; they only have eyes for the little girls. I’ve spent my whole life with people gaping at my birthmark, and it seemed to be pulsing like a beacon my first few days in the public playground. It has gotten easier, although this heat is making my whole body flush as red as a strawberry; it’s hard to know what is self-consciousness and what are the first signs of heatstroke.

  The observation gallery is open for only half an hour at a time, but we’ve started to see long lineups forming hours before the doors open. Both of th
e entrances to the gallery have been fitted with a turnstile with an automatic counter built in: today’s tally was 6,039 visitors over the course of the two showings. Nurse Noël has taken it upon herself to coax the girls to toddle around after a ball or play a game of copycat with her. Nurse Nicolette on the other hand tends to sulk on a bench in the shadows unless one of the girls summons her or needs her help. She is still on civil terms with the Dionnes and visits the farmhouse quite regularly although she’s tight-lipped about her visits. What I wouldn’t give to be able to take a peek into Elzire Dionne’s kitchen and see how it’s changed. I know M. Dionne is driving a new car, even though he still uses his truck on the farm. Ivy says M. Dionne receives five hundred dollars a month for being an official guardian for the quintuplets, even though he has never shown up for a single one of their meetings. That means the other guardians never received his approval to move ahead with this new playground.

  I can’t write another word. I’m too hot and irritable. I hope the heat breaks soon.

  July 10, 1936–11:30 P.M.

  AN UPDATE—IVY KNOCKED at my door about an hour ago. I wasn’t asleep. It’s too hot to sleep. She slipped into my room and whispered, “Grab your robe,” then ducked back out into the corridor.

  We tiptoed through the nursery, out the back door, then kept to the shadow of the fence as we crossed the old playground, or the “private” playground, as we call it now. We know all of the guards quite well, but what on earth would we tell them if one of them came across us sneaking through the property in our nightclothes in the middle of the night?

  Ivy produced a key from her housecoat and unlocked the gate that leads into the public observation playground, then locked it again once we were inside. The moon is merely a crescent tonight, peering down on us with a puckish, sideways smile as if it approved of the giggle fit that overcame us. The stars were as bright as I’ve ever seen, so many of them closely packed together that they seemed to smudge the black sky with silver, dusting the playground with a milky glow. The air tonight must be twenty degrees cooler than it had been during the day, but you could still feel it pulsing out of the walls of the enclosure and rising out of the earth itself.

  I’d pulled my robe over my nightdress when I left my room, but the layers were unbearable. I could feel perspiration prickling on my back. I turned to Ivy to ask what on earth she had up her sleeve, but she had vanished. Squinting, I could just make her out by the wading pool at the other end of the yard, where the observation hall cast a long shadow over the grass. I skirted the yard on the tar track to join her. While I’d been ogling the night sky, she had been unhooking the canvas top from the wading pool and wrestling with the hose to top up the water.

  Cranking the faucet closed, she bent over the pool to stir the water with her hand.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about this for hours.”

  Before I could say anything, she was shrugging out of her housecoat and had whisked her nightdress over her head.

  “Ivy!” I squeaked, my hand involuntarily slapping against my mouth to dampen the sound, wheeling around to look at the windows circling the yard.

  “Shhhhh, Em!”

  Ivy was stepping over the edge of the pool and into the black water. I could hear her breath catch as she sank herself down. With her head below the rim of the pool, all I could spy was a flash of her white breasts beneath the water.

  “What if someone sees you?” I asked, keeping my voice as soft as I could.

  “Sees me? Sees us, you mean! Aren’t you coming in?”

  I could sense rather than see her limbs undulating in the shallow pool. “This is heaven,” she murmured. “Heaven.”

  All I could think of was the long row of windows. What if people could still get into the observation area? What if the guards patrolled it? What if they could see Ivy, naked as the day she was born?

  Ivy read my mind. “No one can see us, Em. Think of it. The doors to the observation area are locked religiously outside of visiting hours, and they’ve built this place so that you can’t see in from anywhere else on the property. It’s perfect. Now get in here.”

  I was slick with sweat in my robe and nightgown, and the sound of the water lapping at the edge of the pool was irresistible. Stepping back toward the wall, where the shadows were darkest, I slipped out of my robe. Then I took a deep breath, tugged my thin nightie over my head, and stepped clumsily into the pool.

  The water was warmer than I’d expected, but still cooler than the air. I sank down until my chin was brushing the surface. I’d never done anything this brash in my life, and it felt, quite suddenly, amazing.

  I started giggling, and Ivy joined me. I slid even more deeply into the shallow pool, so that any laughter leaking out would be muffled by the water. Then I sat up abruptly, goose pimples springing up on my skin.

  “Do you think the girls pee in the water?” I asked. Now it was Ivy’s turn to smother her laugh with her hand. “Thierry changed the water today,” she said when she could get the words out. “I saw him do it after Dr. Dafoe canceled the afternoon showing. So as long as you don’t have a little accident, we’re fine.”

  It was hard not to think about the windows, all those blank eyes staring, but Ivy was right. No one could get in there at this hour.

  “Dr. Dafoe would kill us if he found out,” I whispered.

  “Do you think so?” Ivy mused. “I doubt it. As long as the newspapers didn’t get ahold of the story.” She snorted. “We’re the only ones other than him that have lasted this long in this loony bin. I doubt he could get by without us.”

  Her words hung there for a moment, until I said quietly: “How much longer will you stay, Ivy?”

  She didn’t say anything for a long while, just lay back with her face turned toward the stars. She was languidly stirring the water, swishing her hands like the fins of a slow fish so that every now and again I saw her wrist bone, creamy white, nudging above the surface.

  “I’m in no rush to go,” she said at last. “I’ve told Fred I don’t want to be wed until next summer. I’m needed here still, I think.”

  I felt relief, like a cool stream, flood through me.

  “I’ll stay as long as they’ll have me,” I said. Then, to lighten the mood, I added: “Or as long as I can stand working with crabby Nurse Nicolette.” I thought I saw Ivy’s crooked teeth flash in the starlight. “So take your time, please. I don’t know how long I’d be able to survive here without you.”

  We stayed for another half an hour or so, stirring the water with our toes, talking from time to time, but mostly lying there quietly, looking up at the blinking stars.

  “You know, I think I’m actually cooler,” Ivy said finally. “For the first time in weeks!” I nodded my head. Then we both rose and stepped out of the pool.

  September 14, 1936

  THE NUMBER OF tourists passing through Callander has brought a kind of madness to our little town: half the houses on my old street now have rooms to let for a night or two, and Mother and Father have decided to do the same. They moved the baby’s bassinet and change table into Mother’s sewing room, which is really little more than a nook under the stairs, and have done over little Edith’s room—my old room—to rent out to visitors.

  “Just for the summer months, mind,” is what Mother told me. I’m pleased for their sake that they are able to get a little extra income, but it does mean I can’t spend a night with them anymore, at least not until winter, when things quiet down.

  It was Lewis Cartwright who knocked quietly at the back door for me after he’d finished unloading the truck first thing this morning. His tongue seemed to be more tightly knotted than usual, and it took several long moments for him to untangle it and bid me good morning. I finally managed to get out of him that his father was feeling poorly so he, Lewis, would be delivering today’s stones on his own, which takes a good deal more time.

  I’m fond of chatty Mr. Cartwright and was sorry to hear that he wasn’t well
. “I hope your father starts to feel better soon,” I said to make conversation as we walked to the truck. Lewis nodded earnestly and managed eventually to stammer something to the effect that his father was on the mend already and I needn’t worry.

  I hadn’t spent any time on the Callander road since Ivy and I had gone to see the Midwives’ Pavilion before the public playground opened in July. Our lives are so cloistered at the nursery, although I never think of it that way. Ivy will often go into North Bay to see a film with Fred and has encouraged me to join them, but I always beg off. I like to use my spare time to paint or draw. If I’m not working on my portraits of the girls, I will ask the guards to let me out the gate at the back of the property so I can take my sketchbook with me for a ramble through the forest, marsh, and pasture, rather than brave the traffic on the street.

  It was not yet 8:00 in the morning by the time Lewis was nosing the truck out onto the road in front of the nursery, yet dozens and dozens of cars were already filling the new parking lot that’s been cleared across from the nursery grounds. What I saw properly for the first time now were the structures M. Dionne has built adjacent to his farmhouse on the road to Callander, kitty-corner from the nursery. The larger building is long and squat, but a tall billboard rises at least another two stories out of the façade, capped with two-foot letters that spell OLIVA DIONNE. Beneath his name is a painting of the five girls, which in my opinion bears little resemblance to his daughters, flanked by bright white signs in French and English that read: THE ONLY SOUVENIR AND REFRESHMENT STAND OF THE FATHER OF THE QUINTUPLETS. Dotted on every square inch of the frontage were signs for ICE CREAM, REAL ENGLISH WOOLENS, and POP ON ICE. By comparison, the Dionne farmhouse, tucked behind and to one side, looked even smaller and more dilapidated than ever. To the left of the souvenir shop was a third building, almost as large but set well back from the road, with signage that read PUBLIC WASHROOMS. Through my open window I could hear lively dance music being piped through loudspeakers somewhere on the Dionne property—a tinny, rasping sound that seemed falsely gay.