The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets

by Sarah Miller

  “Father of Five Babies, Doctor Split over World’s Fair Offer,” the Pittsburgh Press announced, making it sound as though Papa Dionne and Dr. Dafoe were squaring up for a fight.

  The truth is not so clear-cut. Early reports from the North Bay Nugget present a Dafoe unruffled by the Chicago deal. “Told of the contract Dionne has signed, Dr. Dafoe was glad to hear that the family would get some money,” the Nugget reported. “Asked as to when the mites could be moved, Dr. Dafoe said, ‘Their condition and progress govern the entire matter.’ ”

  In the big-city papers, however, Dafoe came off as vehemently opposed to the Chicago scheme. The Toronto Star reported him calling the idea of moving the babies anywhere before they were six weeks old “preposterous.” The Little Doc spoke only of their health, making no moral judgments about exhibiting Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie.

  “As long as I am boss, there will be no trip anywhere for those infants, the father can go if he wants to, but not the babies,” one American paper quoted Dafoe. “Public opinion wouldn’t stand for it,” he told the Chicago Tribune. “As their doctor I have the absolute authority right now to prevent their removal.” Such adamant refusals gave the impression that Dafoe and Dafoe alone was standing between the Dionnes’ daughters and death at the hands of greedy showmen. No one bothered to acknowledge that the power Dafoe wielded had come at Oliva Dionne’s insistence. Without the protective clause Oliva had demanded, Dafoe would have had no authority to blockade the babies’ trip to Chicago. But with nothing but the doctor’s blunt comments to go on, it became all too easy to assume that Oliva Dionne regarded his daughters as a cash crop.

  Few papers appear to have sought out Oliva’s side of the story. His emerging reputation for reluctance to speak to the press certainly did not encourage them to try. (Father Silent About Plans to Show Babes, an Iowa headline read.) One reporter, Helen Allyn of the Pittsburgh Press, told her readers that Oliva was “still in a daze over the sudden increase in his family. When he talks about his children he classifies them as the ‘new’ family and the ‘old family.’ ”

  “Who wouldn’t be worried with ten children to feed?” Oliva was quoted. “They offered me $50,000, but the doctor says it may mean the death of a child. What am I to do? Whichever way I guess, it would be wrong.”

  Hardly twenty-four hours after signing, Oliva Dionne was ready to wash his hands of the whole affair. Not only was the attention unbearable, but the contract itself was losing its luster. With the babies unable to be moved, Oliva realized that responsibility for their medical expenses would fall right back into his lap in six weeks. If Ivan Spear got impatient, nothing in the contract prevented him from firing Dafoe and hiring doctors who might declare the babies fit to travel in spite of the enormous risk to their health. Even if Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie all survived the move, what if no one bought tickets to the exhibit? The whole family could end up on the next train back to Ontario without a dime to show for it. Oliva telegrammed Ivan Spear that he wanted out.

  Spear’s response read, “Nothing doing. You are signed to a legal document.”

  Oliva returned Spear’s $100 check and declared that since Elzire hadn’t signed the contract, it wasn’t legal. “I will never go to the Chicago fair,” he told the Toronto Star. “I am a farmer and I will stay on the farm where I belong.”

  * * *

  —

  None of the hoopla over the Chicago deal would matter if even one of the babies did not survive, and as Friday, June 1, drew to a close, things were looking grim.

  Nurse Leroux had pushed herself beyond the brink of exhaustion. Even with Nurse Cloutier there from the Red Cross post, she hardly dared sleep. Yvonne and Annette had improved, but Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were no better. The littlest two were failing fast. Their empty diapers and bloated bellies indicated they were being slowly poisoned by their own waste. Nurse Leroux had every reason to believe they were dying. When Dr. Dafoe arrived, he touched his fingertips to their foreheads and agreed. All Dafoe could think to do was to rinse their clogged bowels with warm water—an enema. For three premature newborns already at death’s door, the risk seemed lethal. The dilemma was twofold: not only whether to do it, but how.

  Dr. Dafoe did what he did best—he improvised. He combed through his bag until he found a tiny, two-inch glass syringe and a narrow length of rubber tubing. Nurse Cloutier watched with horrified fascination as he fitted the tube over the end of the needle and filled the syringe with a warm saltwater solution. The equipment was so small, “he might have been filling a fountain pen.”

  “Doctor, if you do that it will kill them,” she warned.

  “If I d-d-don’t do it, they’ll die.”

  One by one, Nurse Leroux laid Cécile, Émilie, and Marie across her knees so he could perform the simple procedure. Out came one yellowish-black pellet after another.

  “I think they deserve a little rum for that,” Dafoe said afterward, trying to make light of it.

  “What a job,” Nurse Leroux wrote in her daybook when it was all over. “I’m still scared.”

  * * *

  —

  As the babies rallied from their latest brush with death, “the faint dawn of something that had been in Dr. Dafoe’s mind suddenly rose, hard and clear.” Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were not necessarily doomed, Dafoe realized. Every time a chance to survive was extended to them, their matchstick fingers had grasped it. “Living had become a habit with them and they seemed to like it.” The odds were still stacked heavily against those five babies, but if they had it in them not just to linger but to live, well then, it was time to stop showing them off and start guarding what precious little strength they had.

  “At that moment the world’s greatest ‘no’ man was born,” reporter Keith Munro said.

  The shift in the doctor’s outlook was immediately apparent. “The next morning when we arrived at the Dionne home we were greeted by ‘No Admittance’ signs,” Munro remembered. “Of course that couldn’t mean us, we argued.” They’d earned the right to go in, and Charlie Blake, too, with the diapers and incubator. “But when we tried to get in the gate Grandfather Dionne appeared, pitchfork in hand, and sternly bade us scram.”

  The reporters wheedled, reminding him of the bushels of supplies they’d brought all the way from Toronto. Grandpa Dionne stood firm. Orders were orders, and his came straight from Dr. Dafoe.

  When the doctor drove up, Munro and Davis thought for sure they’d be let in. They were pals, weren’t they? They’d sat in the Little Doc’s living room and shared a drink with him. The change in Dafoe was impossible for Munro to miss. “He looked us right in the eye and said quietly, ‘These babies need quiet. I value their lives ahead of anything else in this world.’ Then he walked away, leaving us all feeling cheap as hell.”

  Now Dafoe had only one thing to tell the reporters: “They are alive—that’s about all I can say.”

  Dafoe’s new approach had a galvanizing effect on the media. “What had merely been a mildly sensational story,” Fred Davis recalled, with the reporters half expecting the story to die with one of the babies, “suddenly became a world story, a riot, a mass attack with tanks, bribery and corruption and conspiracy, with a little country doctor on one side of a door, and the newspapers of the world on the outside, hammering, keyholing, shoving things through the crack of the door. Love, money, high-signs, oratory, whispering campaigns, nothing would open that door.”

  In the space of five days, life as the Dionnes knew it had become barely recognizable. “The first week,” Dr. Dafoe said, “was a nightmare, with the frequent alarms and innumerable trips.”

  Five-year-old Thérèse Dionne had developed bronchitis and so was sent to Auntie Legros’s house to shield her fragile baby sisters from infection. To Elzire’s dismay, the little girl left in tears, treated “like an orphan,” she thought,
at the hands of Dr. Dafoe. Soon Ernest, Rose-Marie, Daniel, and Pauline would all follow as the sickness spread through their upstairs quarters.

  Downstairs, they were still battling to keep the bedroom warm at night, mostly for the sake of Yvonne and Annette, who were getting by with hot-water bottles pinned to the sides of the butcher basket. Auntie Legros had sent her coal stove over to be set up in the living room and the flue had promptly caught fire, hardly five feet from Elzire and the babies.

  Nurse Leroux was diligent and dedicated but inexperienced. She was also worn-out, both from constantly tending a quintet of newborns and from persuading Elzire, who saw no reason to stay in bed any longer than she had after her previous births, not to get up.

  The entire situation had turned into “a task for a giant.” One name, and one name only, came to Dr. Dafoe’s mind: Louise de Kiriline.

  According to the people of Corbeil, “never was there a woman up here like Madame de Kiriline.” Descended from Swedish aristocracy, Louise de Kiriline had danced in royal ballrooms and nursed wounded soldiers in Russian prison camps. She spoke half a dozen languages, including French, and was equally adept at driving a dogsled and removing an appendix. After immigrating to Canada, she had served six years at the Red Cross post in Bonfield, where Dr. Dafoe had come to know and rely on her uncommon fortitude. That spring of 1934, Nurse de Kiriline had not only resigned from the post, but had treated herself to a holiday in Toronto. Desperate for help, Dafoe tracked her down by telephone on Saturday, June 2.

  “We’ve got five babies out here,” Dr. Dafoe said when he got her on the line. “I want you to get on the job as soon as you can. You’re b-b-badly needed.”

  Nurse de Kiriline answered without hesitation. “I’ll leave in half an hour.”

  Five hours later, she pulled up to Dr. Dafoe’s redbrick house in Callander. Dafoe had just two sentences for her before she continued up the Corbeil road to the Dionnes’ farm: “Go out and get order into that business out there,” he instructed. “Most important, two-hour feedings, you know that.”

  “No more was needed,” Nurse de Kiriline recalled. The two of them had worked side by side for half a dozen years. She was used to his terse instructions, and he trusted her skill and judgment.

  Now Nurse de Kiriline made her way through the throngs of gawkers and to the Dionnes’ back door, “conscious only of a fleeting feeling of slight annoyance, natural to nurses, over the presence of so many unnecessary people.”

  As she peered down at the infants for the first time, Nurse de Kiriline wondered to herself, Are they really alive? The look of their dark, wrinkled faces and still, small bodies put a catch in her throat. “Then one tiny creature moved a little and, bending closer, I heard a sound like the mewing of a very feeble, very new kitten. Yes, they were alive. But that was about all.”

  Louise de Kiriline found herself nearly as daunted as Nurse Leroux had been. Every inch of the house was cramped and ill-lit. The bed stood barely a foot and a half from the wall. “Pressed into the corner on the other side of the window stood a dresser still ornamented with odd knicknacks, porcelain statues of the Holy Virgin, china trays for buttons and pins and dry palm leaves. On one of its corners enough room had been made for a small tray with the babies’ feeding implements, sterilized and covered with a clean cloth.” In the parlor, an upright piano and pink marble-topped table had been shoved aside to make room for an iron bedstead for the nurses. The big living-dining room was a shambles of boxes. So many gifts and donations had arrived that some of them had not even been opened. They covered the floor and rose, teetering, toward the ceiling.

  The house, in her opinion, was “upset beyond recognition.” She hardly knew where to begin straightening it out. Beneath the chaos lay a perfectly respectable northern Ontario farmhouse, but absolutely nothing in such a farmhouse was suitable for the care of premature babies.

  One fact at least was clear: the house must be cleaned. Such fragile newborns had virtually no resistance to infection, making a sterile environment essential to their survival. Nurse de Kiriline rolled up her sleeves, trusting that a plan would emerge as she banished the winter’s accumulation of dust and woodsmoke.

  That initial uncertainty was imperceptible to everyone in the house. The next morning Nurse de Kiriline commandeered the front parlor and scrubbed it floor to ceiling with warm water and soap. Nothing less than “surgical cleanliness” would do. Out went the bed, the piano, the marble-topped table, and the chairs. In came a neighbor’s dining room table. This she covered with “a shining white sheet” and padded with cotton wool. Since there was no space for washstands, Grandpa Dionne built wooden shelves and nailed them to the walls for Nurse de Kiriline to line with clean white cloths and fill with bottles, basins, soap, and disinfectant. Even the boxes of Kleenex were nailed to the walls to save space. She opened each and every gift box, sorting and organizing everything that was immediately useful, and stowed the rest in the cellar. Last of all, she took down the red tufted curtains from the parlor doorway and replaced them with mosquito netting and fresh white sheets.

  In the space of one day Nurse de Kiriline transformed the parlor into “the babies’ sanctuary.” When she moved Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie into the spick-and-span little room, she thought triumphantly that “their eventual survival was brought within the realm of possibility.”

  Yet in her zeal for protecting the babies’ health, Nurse de Kiriline simultaneously managed to shame and alienate Elzire and Oliva Dionne almost from the moment she walked through their door. The vigor with which she scoured their walls and floors made it clear what this “arrogant taskmistress” thought of their housekeeping. “We gave Madame de Kiriline and Mademoiselle Leroux the living room, the best room in the house, because we wanted them to have the best,” Elzire said. But obviously, their best was not good enough. Nurse de Kiriline’s relief and satisfaction at whisking the newborns out of the “chaos of the upset little home” and into the sterile oasis of the parlor-nursery stung Elzire deeply. Worse, she was still confined to bed, unable to cross through the doorway of Nurse de Kiriline’s domain. Elzire was so distressed at being separated from Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie that Grandpa Dionne was compelled to cut a small window into the wall between the two rooms so she could at least glimpse her daughters from her bed.

  * * *

  —

  Dafoe dubbed himself “Boss Number One,” Nurse de Kiriline “Boss Number Two.” Behind them, the whole country was mobilizing itself like an army to save the Dionnes’ babies. The Red Cross stepped up to guarantee the nurses’ salaries, and a portable bungalow was assembled behind the house for them sleep in. The Toronto Star sent another, larger incubator—“the only five-baby incubator in all the world”—and was having three more built from antique blueprints. Twenty-eight ounces of fresh breast milk arrived every morning by train, courtesy of the best-known pediatrician in Canada, Dr. Alan Brown of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children. The district relief officer came and took a list of everything the nurses needed, from window screens to sheets and towels. The attorney general’s office ordered two constables to keep gawkers and promoters from disturbing Elzire and her newest daughters, while a mile and a half from the Dionne farm, two hundred men fought to keep a brush fire from coming within range of the infants. Dr. Dafoe’s brother, Dr. William Dafoe, visited the babies and recommended oxygen rather than rum to pull them from their sinking spells. The eighty-pound oxygen cylinders arrived the very next day.

  “They are a wonderful thing,” Nurse Leroux marveled. A small funnel placed over the mouth and nose delivered a gentle stream of 95 percent oxygen and 5 percent carbon dioxide, which proved far more effective than the eyedropper of diluted rum, reviving the babies almost instantly. The nurses nicknamed these oxygen cocktails apéritifs.

  Even with aid pouring in, the sheer volume of labor necessary to keep Yvonne, Annette, C�
�cile, Émilie, and Marie alive was staggering. A day’s work at the Dionne farm, said Aunt Alma Dionne, was “worse than seven funerals.”

  Keeping up the supply of hot water remained the most labor-intensive chore. “I’ll say they need water,” said the hired girl, fifteen-year-old Eva Gravelle. “I have to pump about two pails every fifteen minutes.”

  Each of the incubators built by the Star was heated by three hot-water crocks. Every hour, one crock from each incubator had to be poured out and refilled with fresh hot water. “If all crocks were changed at the same time the air inside was likely to become too hot,” Nurse de Kiriline explained, “and later, when they cooled all at once, undesirably cold.” The babies were still remarkably sensitive to changes in temperature. If the thermometer began to creep above 92 degrees, they flushed and panted. When it dropped below 90, their breathing faded as they turned blue around the nostrils.

  “Just to keep those five ‘blue,’ choking little creatures warm and breathing was a twenty-four-hour job,” Dr. Dafoe said of those early days.

  By Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s one-week birthday, a semblance of order had descended on the Dionne farm, in no small part because the “No Admittance” policy had acquired the force of law. To appease the curious public, a signboard was put up outside the gate where Dafoe posted daily bulletins on the infants’ weight.

  The only glimpses to be had of the five babies were through the parlor windows. Toronto Star reporter Keith Munro nosed up to the glass on the morning of Monday, June 4, and witnessed a scene he’d remember forever. “It was one of the banner days of my life,” he proclaimed.