by Sarah Miller
The spectacle was nothing more than bath time.
As Munro peered through the pane, Nurse de Kiriline lifted a “tiny roll of white” out of an incubator and carried it to the big table in the middle of the room. Nurse de Kiriline knew full well the reporters were watching and was willing to humor them as long as they followed the rules. With a smile toward the window she called out, “This is Émilie.”
To Munro’s delight, Émilie roused in the unfamiliar sunlight. “All of a sudden she opened her mouth and yawned prodigiously. Then she stretched. Actually stretched. Arms the size of your little finger went out straight, and her tiny legs did the same. Even the minute fingers and toes wriggled.”
That was the magic of the quintuplets—the infants were so impossibly small, and there were so impossibly many of them, that the most ordinary happenings had the power to enthrall grown men. Munro recorded every blink and breath as Émilie was daubed with warm olive oil and laid atop a hot-water bottle on the scale.
“Émilie weighs one pound, thirteen ounces,” Nurse de Kiriline announced—down from her scant birth weight.
Munro watched, no less fascinated, as the procedure was repeated on Cécile, Annette, and Yvonne. Then came Marie. Munro knew she was supposed to be littlest of all, yet it was difficult to conceive of a smaller baby than he had already seen. “The clothing was unwrapped and there she lay, absolutely motionless and oh so small. Her sisters were small, but this mite was tinier. All her body was wrinkled.”
Marie did not stir as Nurse de Kiriline bathed her face and eyes. “Even the nurse seemed disturbed by her lack of movement,” Munro noticed.
“Marie, Marie,” Nurse de Kiriline crooned.
“Movement began in one of the arms which was drawn up to the face as though to shield her eyes from the sun. A leg kicked. Both legs kicked, and there was a wail so weak as to be almost inaudible. Marie is alive. In fact, she is livelier than usual, the nurse softly states as she bathes her. As she holds her up, the little body comes between the watcher and the sunlight. One could almost swear that she is transparent.”
* * *
—
The public’s appetite for these glimpses of the quintuplets was insatiable. So was Elzire Dionne’s. She could get no closer to her babies than the reporters. Stranded in her bed, Elzire “grieved over the loss of her doll-sized roommates.”
Though some pitied Elzire Dionne, assuming that any twenty-five-year-old woman with ten children must be the victim of a “brute of a man,” Elzire’s feelings were entirely to the contrary. “I’d be lost without a baby in my arms,” she said many years afterward. “I can’t imagine myself without a baby.” As a child she had loved to dress in overalls and play first baseman on her brothers’ baseball team, yet by cutting coupons from soap wrappers and sending away for prizes, the little tomboy built herself a family of ten dolls. They were so precious to her that as a bride of sixteen, Elzire smuggled the entire collection into a closet in her new home. The distress she now felt at being separated from her ten living, breathing children hardly compared. Days dragged into weeks, and still Dr. Dafoe and the nurses insisted she remain in bed, thanks to a fever and an inflamed vein in her leg.
Elzire bided her time by making five down comforters for her new daughters, each a different color, carefully selected for each of her jumelles. (That was her pet name for them—that and petites. Petites means “little ones,” and jumelles is French for “twins,” no matter how many.) Pink for Yvonne, yellow for Annette, green for Cécile, lilac for Émilie, and blue for Marie.
Elzire’s situation barely improved when she was finally allowed to leave her bed more than a month after giving birth. The Dionnes’ parlor had become “a super-death-fighting laboratory,” and Nurse de Kiriline’s vigilance over it was absolutely rigid. Like everyone else, Elzire dutifully donned mask and gown and scrubbed her hands before entering what Nurse de Kiriline dubbed the “Holy of Holies.”
All Elzire was permitted to do was gaze at her daughters through the lids of the incubators for a few minutes each day, the Toronto Star reported. “She always remarks on how cute they look,” one of the nurses told the Star. “She thinks they are getting the very best care and never tries to interfere with them at all.”
The papers made her sound meek and obedient, but underneath, Elzire was throbbing with frustration. According to Dr. Dafoe, the care of Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie was “too highly specialized” for Elzire to lend a hand in. That was one thing. His order forbidding her to hold or cuddle her babies was quite another. “The nurses won’t let me in to touch them and get close enough to them so that I can really see them,” Elzire told a French-speaking reporter from the Toronto Star.
“Doctor Dafoe’s heart was made of stone,” one of his admirers bragged. “Doctor Dafoe knew that a stray microbe from their own Mama Dionne could kill them just as neatly, just as quickly, as any bug breathed onto them by their worst enemy.” Dafoe himself didn’t touch them if he could avoid it—didn’t even enter the nursery any more than he had to, for fear of carrying in germs from any of his other patients. That was no consolation to the babies’ mother.
“I long to hold my little jumelles and sponge them off just like the nurses. But they don’t even want me around,” Elzire said. “They don’t want Oliva around, either. We are outcasts in our own home.”
Holding in her temper and not back-talking to Dafoe and de Kiriline became a full-time job for Elzire. It was not easy in such small quarters, for she was not half so shy as she appeared to the English-speaking reporters who rarely pried a word out of her. Those who knew her well knew that Elzire Dionne was “quick-spoken where her children were concerned, for all her timidity with strangers.”
Elzire did not dare defy the nurses openly—she could see better than anyone that her daughters’ lives depended on the staff—but she was also not about to let them deprive her babies of a mother’s love and protection. At times she crept into the nursery, slid the glass lids of the incubators aside, and sprinkled Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie with holy water. The little vial had been sent to her by a sympathetic mother from the grotto at Lourdes, the French shrine where the Blessed Mother had appeared to Saint Bernadette. Elzire knew the nurses would never approve of such a thing. They would doubtless think it unsanitary, seeing as how they were forever plunging everything but the babies themselves into vats of boiling water. But to Elzire, nothing could be more pure.
* * *
—
Oliva advised Elzire to do her best to get along with the staff. “They’re doing everything for the babies,” he said. “And bossy as Dr. Dafoe is—even if he does treat us like dirt under his feet—”
“We’ll just have to take his dirt,” she finished.
It wasn’t that they were ungrateful. For years to come, Oliva and Elzire would state time and again how much they valued the care and attention lavished on their babies. More disconcerting to the Dionnes than the staff’s attitude was the sense that their family was being splintered. Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were turning into a family unto themselves, with Dr. Dafoe and the nurses as their parents.
Even the “old family” had been fractured by Dafoe when he shunted Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline from their home. “We were helpless,” Thérèse remembered. She and her siblings had never been away from home without their parents. “We begged to go back to them.” But in the weeks Elzire was bedridden, the elder Dionne children appear to have been allowed back into their house for a single visit. Little Pauline’s first birthday passed while she was living with her aunt and uncle; when she finally returned home for good after almost two months, she did not recognize her own mother.
Held captive by their daughters’ helplessness, the Dionnes choked down their frustration and carried on as best they could. They confined themselves mostly to the hot summer kitchen a
nd the bedroom so that the nurses might have more elbow room in the big living-dining room. Elzire cooked the nurses’ meals and served them “like ladies,” but she went about her tasks “with the abstracted manner of a woman who is not mistress of her own household.”
Oliva had it a little easier, for he could escape outdoors to be “master in the cow barn and hay field,” but he was still being bombarded with moneymaking offers from would-be entrepreneurs. Morning after morning he was accosted at the train station when he came to pick up his daughters’ daily shipments of breast milk. Some hoped to rent a square of Dionne land to sell postcards and hot dogs. A pair of Americans offered to pay him thousands for the bed the quintuplets were born in. There was no escaping the attention, even at home. The No Admittance signs made the otherwise nondescript farmhouse conspicuous, effectively pointing the curious straight to the Dionnes’ front door. Cars with license plates from as near as Quebec and as far as Oklahoma made their way up the Corbeil road, and not all of the visitors were courteous. “We have had no trouble with the Canadians,” Grandpa Dionne told the North Bay Nugget, “but some of the Americans have been too inquisitive.” Indeed, the American promoters were swarming so thickly and so persistently that local officials were exploring the possibility of having some of them deported.
“There have been so many other promoters rushing in and out of the Dionne home that they have become suspicious of everybody,” Ivan Spear’s lawyer complained. “These other promoters attempted to point out loop-holes in our contract, and poison the minds of the family against it,” he claimed.
Dafoe was just as fed up with being approached by sideshow managers. “They have offered me money and everything else if I can get the family signed up,” he told the Toronto Star. “I won’t have anything to do with it at all.” A story was making the rounds that Dafoe had even threatened to abandon the Dionne case entirely if the showmen didn’t ease up. “I’m not denying it; I’m not saying it’s true,” he said. “My interest is those children and keeping them alive. I’m not in the least interested in any scheme to take them somewhere to be exhibited.”
Most worrisome of all was the Chicago deal. Despite “strenuous efforts to break the contract,” the agreement remained binding, and that knowledge hung heavily over Oliva Dionne’s head. He couldn’t eat. The tension gave him chronic headaches. His anxiety kept him from taking any pleasure in his daughters’ birth and made him snappish with reporters.
Grandpa Dionne was more cordial to the press, often chatting with them over the fence as he stood guard at the gate. “You know, Oliva has been alone here for ten years, and was always able to look after his business dealings in a capable manner,” he praised his son. “But he wasn’t thinking clearly when he signed that contract…it wasn’t fair to ask him to act at such a time. The contract must be cancelled.” They were not accepting the $100 weekly payments for the babies’ expenses, Grandpa Dionne explained. “As fast as money arrives from Chicago, we send it back,” he said.
* * *
—
On Friday, July 13, Ivan Spear arrived in North Bay, allegedly to compromise with the Dionnes. “We are quite willing to be reasonable, and are not trying to force the issue,” Spear’s lawyer told the Nugget. What happened next baldly contradicted that statement.
The negotiations between Oliva Dionne and Ivan Spear happened behind closed doors, but whatever was said prompted immediate action. By Monday, the Ontario attorney general’s office had come up with an unprecedented strategy to thwart Spear’s contract and keep Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie safe in their Canadian nursery.
The plan hinged on the fact that although Oliva was still bound to the terms of the contract, the government of Ontario was not. If Oliva and Elzire were to sign over custody of their babies to the Red Cross, Spear could not touch them. To ensure that the little girls would have every chance to grow into normal, healthy children without interference from Spear and his ilk, the attorney general proposed a custody term of two years. More extraordinary still, the Red Cross intended to oversee the construction of a fully staffed private hospital to house the Dionnes’ newborns across the street from their farm, complete with every modern convenience the farmhouse lacked.
Oliva was dumbstruck. It was an ironclad solution, guaranteed to keep his fragile daughters free from the grasp of showmen and hucksters, and yet it violated his every instinct as a father. To guarantee them the care and protection they so desperately needed, Oliva and Elzire would have to live apart from their five baby girls for two years. In their place, a board of four handpicked guardians would function as Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie’s legal parents.
As Oliva told it, the conversation took a disturbing turn when he tried to discuss his reservations about the guardianship proposal with Dr. Dafoe. “Turning over custody of our babies to the Red Cross would mean surrendering our God-given rights as parents,” he protested. “My wife would never consent to it.”
“You’d better talk it over with her and see,” Dafoe replied, “and if you don’t do what I say, I’ll walk out on the case. I’ve told you before I would quit. I’m telling you this again for the last time. And that’s not all. The Red Cross will withdraw the nurses and take away all nourishment and supplies. That includes the shipments of mother’s milk.”
Could Dr. Dafoe have handed down such a cruel ultimatum? Everything about it goes against his image as the benevolent country doctor adored far and wide as the savior of the Dionne Quintuplets. It’s tempting to shrug off the story as the fabrication of a desperate and angry father.
Yet it is a fact that Dafoe could be startlingly blunt and “more than a little gruff.” He was bullheaded, too. If a flu-stricken patient disregarded his orders for fresh air in midwinter, he’d been known to smash a windowpane to guarantee his instructions would be followed. “In a sickroom he was a tyrant in sheep’s clothing,” his biographer said, who “had no time or patience for sentimental twaddle.” Dafoe’s relationship with the Dionnes was no exception. “He treated them with disdain,” the doctor’s secretary admitted. And hadn’t there been rumors in the newspapers, when Dafoe was being badgered by promoters, that he’d threatened to quit? Outrageous though Oliva Dionne’s claim may seem at first, this less-than-saintly side of Dafoe’s personality suggests it is not outside the realm of possibility.
Regardless of whether any threat was made, what is certain is that the guardianship proposal left Oliva more helpless to the extraordinary circumstances of his daughters’ birth than ever. If there had been so much as a hint from Dafoe or the Red Cross that a delay in signing might cease or even slow the shipments of breast milk, the possibility amounted to a death warrant for Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. No father could take such a risk. The prospect of letting his daughters’ welfare fall into the hands of Ivan Spear was equally out of the question. Oliva’s sole option was to sign half of his family over to the Red Cross. Not only that, but he must convince his wife to sign away her two-month-old daughters as well.
* * *
—
“We were raking hay,” Elzire remembered of the day he broke the news to her. It was heavy work, but she welcomed the escape from Dafoe and the nurses, and the feeling of being “an alien” in her own home.
Oliva hardly spoke. Yes or no, he muttered as they worked, and that was all. Elzire sensed something was wrong. “His face looked as though the world had come to an end.” Finally, Oliva set down his hay rake and took Elzire’s from her. “Brace yourself for a shock, my dear,” he warned. Elzire did her best to prepare herself, but as Oliva described the terms of the proposal, her vision dimmed and her legs threatened to give way.
“Why, with such an unnatural arrangement, our house would be divided,” she cried.
“It’s already divided, Elzire,” Oliva said. “What control have we over the quints?” The truth of it was so cutting, Elzire broke down
and wept. Oliva said no more.
For the sake of her babies, Elzire knew she could not fight. “To me they were five little human flowers—delicate hot-house flowers that required the most constant and careful and expert attention. Costly attention for which we had no money to pay,” she said. Yet everything in her resisted. While the nurses were out on the porch, Elzire smuggled herself back into the parlor-nursery and sprinkled her five daughters with holy water. “If I live to be a hundred I’ll never forget how awed I was, how overwhelmed by my sense of responsibility to my premature incubator babies,” she remembered. “How can I accept it?” she asked herself. “How can I?”
There was no time to resign herself to the idea. Lawyer H. R. Valin and Mr. Alderson of the Red Cross arrived with the paper for her to sign that very day. Elzire sat at the kitchen table with the handwritten document before her, a blur of English swirling around her as the two men discussed the details with Oliva. Elzire could not comprehend a word of it. (Since French did not become an official language of Canada until 1969, no one was legally required to present or even explain the document to Elzire in her own language.) “Then there was an ominous lull. And silence. Deadly silence, and next thing I knew Oliva was signing the memorandum.”
In another second I will have to put my name below Oliva’s, she thought. In just another second, I, too, will have to sign that paper.
There was no other way. Even the government had looked for alternatives. The Children’s Aid Society was willing to step in, but ironically, the excellent care Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were receiving from their nurses and Dr. Dafoe made it impossible. “As far as we are aware they are being well cared for and are in no danger of being neglected,” the Society stated. The Dionnes were deemed “fit and worthy parents,” and if there was no neglect, the Society had no authority.
