by Shelley Wood
And the thing is, I am happy, Lewis. I’m happier than I ever thought I could be. I was terrified at the idea of coming back here, to Callander, for Em’s funeral, of running the risk of seeing, face-to-face, the man who haunted my nightmares for so long. But I couldn’t not come, could I? I feel I owed that to Em, at the very least, and I owed that to the others too. No one has loved them like I have. My whole life long.
I shudder to think: what if I hadn’t forced myself to come back for the funeral? What if you hadn’t gotten leave to attend? I’m a staunch atheist, but it’s hard not to believe in some greater force, yanking on invisible levers to make our paths cross again, all these years later. What I realize now is that what happened to me back on that train didn’t ruin my life, but it certainly sent me on a radically different course. Probably, I must admit, for the better. If it hadn’t happened, I’m not sure I would have followed through with Mrs. Fangel and the Art Students League, and I likely wouldn’t be the person I am today, a woman who could come back to this place, my head held high. Lewis, I can’t help but wish we hadn’t spent all these years apart, you and I, that I had summoned the courage to tell you everything earlier. But I wasn’t ready for this back then. I’m ready now.
It was a perfect evening on the shore, crisp and clear and calm: it’s a damn shame we didn’t get to share it. Even your blue heron, swooping low over the lake, seemed sorry to see me sitting alone. The lake was still, and when the clouds parted it was as if the twilight had been burnished, the breeze stirring the water coral, bronze, and copper. I couldn’t mix that color with my paints if I tried.
I sat on our log (as I’ve come to think of it), listening to the leaves whispering their secrets and smiling over a secret of my own. Our secret, really, although maybe it’s too soon to say for sure. Let me say this, for now. I was lobbing pebbles into the water and watching the gilded ripples rolling away as if through molten metal when it struck me: the shores of Lake Nipissing are absolutely littered with stones. Did you notice that when we were here together? I didn’t until tonight, although I admit my attention was occupied elsewhere. I always remember you telling me that you and your father had dredged up every last one of these enchanted pebbles from the lake and hauled them away to Quintland. There, of course, they disappeared into the pockets of barren women, tourists, and collectors to be whisked away to the four corners of the world. And yet here they are, returned as if by magic and free for the taking. Shall I bring you one as proof? Perhaps Lake Nipissing was holding on to a few good-luck stones on the off chance we’d come back. Maybe it’s our turn to be lucky.
I can’t wait to see you.
Love,
E.
Author’s Note
When he died in 1943, Dr. Allan R. Dafoe had amassed a personal fortune of $182,466—roughly equivalent to the savings of each of the Dionne quintuplets at that time.
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In 1955, when Marie, Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne turned 21, only $800,000 remained in their trust fund.
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Marie Dionne died of an apparent blood clot in 1970.
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By the mid-1990s, Annette, Yvonne, and Cécile, divorced or unmarried, were living together on a combined income of $746 per month.
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In 1998, bowing to public pressure, the Ontario government paid the surviving Dionne quintuplets and Marie’s children a one-time sum of $4 million. Cécile’s share was reportedly stolen by her son.
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By 2018, Yvonne had died and Annette was living independently, but Cécile had once again been living as a ward of the state, subsisting off a basic government pension.
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Between 1934 and 1941, tourism revenue amassed by the Ontario government related to Quintland was estimated to be half a billion dollars.
Acknowledgments
I’m extremely grateful to the following publishers for granting me gratis permission to reprint excerpts from the real-life articles included in my book: the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, the Canadian Press, UPI (previously UP), King Features Syndicate Inc., and Postmedia, on behalf of North Bay Nugget, Montreal Gazette, and the Ottawa Citizen. The New York Times editorial titled “The Quintuplet Problem” was licensed and reprinted with permission. In some cases, news articles and/or headlines were edited marginally to suit my story, most notably the mention of Lewis Cartwright in “New Dive Bomber Is Canada’s Contribution to the Skies” and the addition of the list of mourners to the 1954 article by the Canadian Press. The King Features columns were widely syndicated; I found these undated clippings via the City of North Bay Dionne Quints digitization project funded by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship, Culture, and Recreation. The original publication dates could not be ascertained by the publisher, which granted permission. I chose dates that fit my story. La Voix is a fictional newspaper that kindly stepped in at the last minute when permission could not be obtained to reprint a bona fide publication.
I’m indebted to my readers, especially Ray Wood, who awoke in me an early appreciation for books and a later affection for birds. The Distillibus Writers (Joanne Carey, Jorie Soames, and Glenna Turnbull), Ashley and Francie (La Jooje) Howard, Tyler Dyck, Shelley Pacholok, Albert Berkshire, Anne Fleming, Adam Lewis Schroeder, and Tamas Dobozy all helped me with my first faltering chapters or endured multiple drafts. Other B.C. writers graciously shared their wisdom, reassurances, and community: John Lent, Nancy Holmes, Ashley Little, Alix Hawley, Michael V. Smith, Sean Johnston, and Erin McNair. Many thanks to Pat and Tony Dyck for the generous loan of their Tuwanek “Crab Shack,” where so much of this project was written, rejected, and written again.
In Ontario, I’m especially grateful to Natasha Wiatr of the Callander Bay Heritage Museum, who pointed the way to Quintland and helped me track down various bits and pieces, including key articles from the North Bay Nugget. In North Bay itself, my thanks go to Ed Valenti of the Dionne Quints Heritage Board and Elaine Pepin of the City of North Bay for giving me a peek into the not-yet-reopened Dionne museum. Farther south, props go to Brenda Liddle for a bed, a trout, and the shad flies.
Annette, Cécile, Marie, Émilie, and Yvonne: few can imagine what you lived through and my own efforts, I’m sure, fall short. If nothing else, I hope my novel leads more people to learn of your story and to keep it in their hearts and minds.
This novel came to life thanks to my editor at William Morrow, Lucia Macro, and my agent, Stephanie Sinclair, who somehow managed to squeeze me into a year of other, more monumental firsts.
To other friends and family who believed in me before I did: you rock. Rene Unser: in my moments of deepest doubt, I applied your “Motivation Station” to my writing, if not my stride, which goes a long way to explaining why I’m running in the middle of the pack with a book in my hands.
The Quintland Sisters is dedicated to my mum, who will never get to read it, who loved me more than most people are lucky enough to be loved in a lifetime, and who raised me to always do the harder thing. It’s also for Tyler, who reads everything, who suffers me at my worst, and makes me want to be my best.
Bibliography and Sources Consulted
This book is a work of fiction. Its principal aim was to spin a make-believe tale that might help keep the truth from being forgotten; the facts themselves are stranger than fiction. Objectivity absconded long ago with its own share of the windfall, and I’ve made no attempt to track it down. Instead, I relied heavily on other sources that have tried, to varying degrees, to be more objective:
Barker, Lillian, The Dionne Legend: Quintuplets in Captivity (Doubleday, 1951).
Berton, Pierre, The Dionne Years: A Thirties Melodrama (W. W. Norton, 1978).
Blatz, William E., N. Chant, and M. W. Charles et al., Collected Studies on the Dionne quintuplets (University of Toronto Press, 1937).
Brough, James, Annette Dionne, Cécile Dionne, Marie Dionne, and Yvonne Dionne, We Were Five: The Dionne Quintuplets Story from Birth Through Girlhood to W
omanhood (Simon and Schuster, 1965).
The Dionne Quintuplets, documentary, National Film Board of Canada, directed and produced by Donald Brittain, CBC Television (1978).
Gifford, Jim, Hurricane Hazel: Canada’s Storm of the Century (Dundurn Press, 2004).
Legros, Donalda, and Marie-Jeanne Lebel, Administering Angels of the Dionne Quintuplets (Northern Publishing Co., 1936).
Million Dollar Babies, TV miniseries, produced by CBC Television and CBS Television (1994).
Nodelman, Perry, Dear Canada: Not a Nickel to Spare; The Great Depression Diary of Sally Cohen, Toronto, Ontario, 1932 (Scholastic Canada, 2007).
Soucy, Jean-Yves, Annette Dionne, Cécile Dionne, and Yvonne Dionne, Family Secrets: The Dionne Quintuplets’ Autobiography. Translated by Kathe Roth (Berkley Books, 1997).
Tesher, Ellie, The Dionnes (Doubleday Canada, 1999).
The “Act for the Protection of the Dionne Quintuplets” was redacted slightly for use in this novel. The full Act is available online.
More time than I care to admit was spent devouring the lavish news coverage of the Dionne quintuplets between 1934 and 1939 (and beyond). Almost every day for those first five years, the international press dished out Dionne details on everything from tonsils to turkeys, and the adoring public lapped it up. Decades later, so did I.
All newspaper articles are used with permission.
P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
About the Author
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Meet Shelley Wood
About the Book
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Author Q&A
Reading Group Guide Questions
About the Author
Meet Shelley Wood
SHELLEY WOOD is a writer, journalist, and editor. Her work has appeared in the New Quarterly, Room, the Antigonish Review, Bath Flash Fiction, and the Globe and Mail. She has won the Frank McCourt prize for creative nonfiction, Free Fall Magazine’s short prose contest, Causeway Lit’s creative nonfiction prize, and the Tethered by Letters F(r)iction award. Born and raised in Vancouver, she has lived in Montreal, Cape Town, and the Middle East, and now has a home, a man, and a dog in British Columbia, Canada.
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About the Book
Author Q&A
Q: What drew you to this story?
A: In my local library, I stumbled across a book called 100 Photos That Changed Canada, which included a picture of five identical toddlers. I recognized most of the other topics in the book, but these girls? I’d never heard of them. The more I looked into it, the crazier it seemed that I had never known their story. I’ve since learned that there have been mega-fans over the years: people who have followed the Dionne quintuplets since birth, who’ve kept scrapbooks, collected and traded memorabilia, and, more recently, have Pinterest boards or Facebook groups. A half-dozen books have been written about them over the last fifty years, including several autobiographies coauthored by the quintuplets. At the time I started researching The Quintland Sisters, however, nothing had been published since the late 1990s. The two surviving quintuplets live private lives and very seldom speak with the press. Moreover, the generation that for decades had followed every tidbit of news about the quintuplets has largely passed away, and this story, I feared, was in danger of vanishing with them.
Q: Yet you chose to write a novel rather than a nonfiction account. Why?
A: Partly I chose fiction because others have already covered this topic more journalistically. In particular, Ellie Tesher’s and Pierre Berton’s books are probably the most rigorous and impartial, closely documenting the sad twists in the lives of the famous girls, including during the many decades after they left the nursery. Nonfiction lovers can still track those books down.
Novels, on the other hand, reach a different type of reader, so that was one of my chief motives. I also liked the idea of writing about a period that can’t be pinned down by facts—even the newspaper accounts of the day swerved closer to propaganda than objective record. By writing about the first five years of their lives, I was able to zoom in on a period that the two surviving quintuplets would scarcely remember. Also, all of the other eyewitnesses to these early years have long since died. This allowed me to create a fictional character, Emma Trimpany, who could stand in for the reader—an insider, someone who could observe and grow alongside the babies themselves, someone who could wrestle with the issues, but, most of all, someone who would love these children as children, nothing more.
Q: Do you feel there are heroes and villains in the story of the Dionne quintuplets? Or is this a situation of everyone doing what they think was best at the time?
A: Among the fictional characters in my novel, as well as the real-life figures of the day, there were those who acted for the good of the Dionne quintuplets and others who may have acted with more nefarious intent. What’s more, motives changed as the years went by. Without a doubt, the Dionne story represents yet another instance of the Canadian government electing to take children away from parents deemed unsuitable and later failing to take responsibility for the safety and well-being of those children.
My hope is that people reading my novel who already had an opinion as to who was “good” and who was “bad” might see things somewhat differently through the course of the story. For those who knew nothing about the Dionne babies before picking up this book, I will have done my job if they, like Emma herself, are left with more questions than answers and struggle to understand how things could have been done differently to give the children a normal, happy life.
Q: You visited the site of the former nursery and the Dionne property while writing this book. What does Quintland look like today?
A: It doesn’t look like anything! I think this is truly surreal and helps emphasize my earlier point that the Dionne story is in danger of disappearing altogether. Driving the old road from Callander to Corbeil, I literally passed right by the original nursery, which is still standing, without batting an eye. There are no signs to mark the spot where cars once crammed into the makeshift parking lots and tourists lined up by the thousands. Set back some distance from the old nursery is a nondescript shed that was actually one of the turnstile entrances to the viewing corridor, which surrounded the public playground. A little ways further down the road, unmarked, is a building that now looks to be a private home but was once the Midwives’ Pavilion and souvenir stand. The only way to figure this out is by comparing photographs from the 1930s and 1940s with these somewhat dilapidated structures still in use today. Hats off to Natasha Wiatr, the curator at the tiny Callander Bay Heritage Museum, who has taken the trouble to document what’s still standing and has drawn a map to point curious visitors on their way.
One other important building can be spied on the Callander side of the old nursery: the “Big House,” built to accommodate the entire Dionne family when the girls were nine years old. Now a retirement home, this formidable mansion gets a mention in the last few pages of my book. What’s not detailed in the postscript but loomed large in my thoughts while writing was how the girls fared once the family was reunited. These years have been vehemently disputed. Public sympathies and those of the press during this period swung back to support the Dionne parents—the other Dionne children describe a happy upbringing. The quintuplets themselves, however, have since said they were sexually abused by their father and beaten by their mother, calling the Big House “the saddest home we have ever known.”
The exploitation of the Dionne quintuplets in childhood and the extent to which they were “forgotten” as teens and adults is something I struggled with while writing this book. Early on, I planned to donate a portion of the proceeds from The Quintland Sisters to the Dionne museum. What I discovered when I visited is that there are two separate collections in the region today: one located in Dr. Dafoe’s old home, which is now the Callander Bay Heritage Museum; the other housed in the original Dionne farmhouse, relocated to North Ba
y. I wish the very best to both museums and to their efforts to keep this story alive, but I’ve elected to make my ongoing donation to the Canadian Centre for Child Protection.
Q: Identical quintuplets captured the imagination of people the world over, but do you think there were other factors at play that turned them into one of the world’s first “reality” stars? What lessons can be learned from the Dionne quintuplets’ story?
A: The oft-repeated number is that the chance of a woman giving birth to five identical babies, at the time the Dionne quintuplets were born, was 1 in 57 million. The fact that they all survived—particularly given the remote, rustic setting—truly was a miracle. This was smack in the middle of the Great Depression and during the tense lead-up to World War II, yet these charming and photogenic little girls in faraway Northern Ontario seemed to be living a fairy-tale life. Being able to read about them in the paper, see their pictures every day, listen to them on the radio, and even go and see them firsthand if you had the time and money must have transported people out of their sorrows and debts and given them something to root for.
I’m not sure what lessons were learned in terms of how the lives of children like these can be better protected from the spotlight. The Dionne quintuplets themselves wrote a public letter in 1997 to the parents of the McCaughey septuplets warning that “multiple births should not be confused with entertainment, nor should they be an opportunity to sell products.” Since then, however, multiple reality TV shows have come and gone, featuring different families, and only time will tell how those children will weather the limelight.
