by Sarah Miller
Elzire’s hand “shook like a leaf” as she set her name to the paper. This date, she knew, would be written on her heart when she died. As she signed, Elzire was already imagining how she would eventually explain to her daughters why she and Oliva had done such a thing. “I would tell them that we had placed their welfare above every other consideration,” she vowed.
By midsummer, so many cars had worn down the ruts in the Corbeil road that it was being rebuilt. It had also been unofficially dubbed “Dionne Highway” and “Quintuplet Drive.” When visitors asked for directions, they no longer bothered with the name of the town, the Chicago Tribune reported. “They want to know ‘How far to where the quintuplets live and which way do we go?’ ”
Letters addressed to “Mrs. Oliva Dionne, the Miracle Mother, North Woods, Canada” had no trouble finding their way to the Dionnes’ mailbox. Newspaper readers tracked every fraction of an ounce Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie lost or gained “with the excitement of a sporting event.” They celebrated as one by one the babies graduated from oil baths and incubators to soap and water and white enamel cots; rhapsodized over their two-month newspaper portraits; and bit their fingernails while Marie received a radium treatment to shrink a spongy, blood-filled growth the size of a quarter from her thigh.
“What is there about these babies which has enchanted half a world and back again?” a Pittsburgh Press editorial asked. “Why is it that when they sneeze, the press of a continent calls attention to it?”
In part it had to do with a public aching for good news. Column after column of the papers was saturated with grim headlines. Drought. Fire. Starvation. The whole world was struggling to make ends meet. Hundreds of thousands of men were out of work. One of every five Canadian families depended on government relief payments for their survival. Men, women, and children alike felt small and helpless in the face of the Great Depression. And then came the Dionne Quintuplets, five baby girls who personified an entire continent’s fears for its future. Nothing could be smaller, more helpless, or more determined to thrive than those babies. “Of course, they have no right to be alive at all,” Dr. Dafoe said. “But they are and that is the wonder of it.” Hardly anyone could watch their grip on life slowly but surely strengthening without feeling encouraged.
Marie in particular became the world’s darling. “Not ‘How are the quintuplets?’ but ‘How is Marie?’ is the universal question,” said the Toronto Star. “She is so tiny, so weak, she gets into your heart,” Red Cross nurse Cloutier confessed.
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The nurses were every bit as susceptible to the babies’ appeal as the public. Despite the constant repetition of their duties, Nurse de Kiriline explained, attending to Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie “never could lose its entrancing novelty and its intense fascination. And mingled with this, deepening the experience, came the inevitable growth of affection and love for the five little lives, which made the hours away from the babies seem all too long, the time to re-enter the nursery a moment of delightful anticipation and the hours spent with them exquisite enjoyment.”
Already, glimmers of individuality were beginning to shine in each of the five baby girls. As newborns, they looked so much alike that the only surefire way to tell them apart was by weight. Their skin was too tender for ID bracelets or necklaces; only the incubators were labeled, and so the nurses had taken utmost care to handle one baby at a time, and to put each back in her proper place.
“I remember one of the first times I placed all the babies in a proud heap on the table,” said Nurse de Kiriline. “My heart suddenly stood still when I realized their extreme similarity to each other as they lay softly cooing and contentedly blinking.” Until then, she’d only really known them by their charts—which was the heaviest, which the weakest, the most prone to blue spells or anemia. Nurse de Kiriline was not entirely sure she’d returned the babies to the correct incubators until they were weighed the following morning. After that, bracelets with engraved nameplates were ordered, to be absolutely sure no mix-ups occurred.
“But gradually,” Nurse de Kiriline noticed, “there began to be characteristic differences in the babies, each small personality became subtly unique.”
Yvonne, being the biggest, was not difficult to distinguish from her sisters. Yet in spite of her size, she was not the hardiest. She was more prone to sickness as well as skittishness. “In many ways I would say she was more sensitive and easier to frighten than the others,” Nurse de Kiriline said. Changes in routine were apt to provoke a reaction from Yvonne. Sometimes it even seemed she was frightened by her own imagination. Her face was larger, her neck shorter. The most curious of the babies, the sight of something interesting made her mouth pop open. She was Nurse Leroux’s special pet.
Annette was in many ways an ideal baby. “A more perfectly shaped child could hardly be conceived than Annette,” Nurse de Kiriline proclaimed, and no one contradicted her. Despite the sisters’ breathtaking similarity, something about Annette’s looks drew extra attention. Mentally, physically, and emotionally she was also the most robust, “well-balanced, harder to frighten and more difficult to upset.”
Cécile’s face was only “a shade rounder” than Annette’s, making the two of them easier to mix up than any of the others. The truer contrast was in their personalities. Cécile’s “nature was a distinctly placid one.” Where Annette’s gaze was quick and bright, Cécile’s was calm and deep, her movements less lively. She cried the least of all her sisters, and was “pathetically patient” when sick.
Émilie was still frail enough that it was hard for Nurse de Kiriline to paint a picture of her personality. Fortunately, her most distinctive trait was being an obliging feeder, as she was almost fatally anemic. Later, when she grew sturdier, Émilie “acquired the disposition of a slightly temperamental but adorable imp.”
Marie’s size alone made it simple for anyone to single her out, for she was consistently the smallest. There was more to it than that, though. Her solitary demeanor gave Marie the air of “a small duckling in the midst of a flock of lively yellow chickens,” Nurse de Kiriline said. “She rarely laughed or even smiled; she cooed to herself, when at last she mastered the trick, in an absolutely detached way, perfectly alone, not at all in the company of the others.” The staff soon took to calling her “the little Madonna.”
While nurses reveled in their twenty-four-hour shifts with the babies, the Dionne family was still making do with glimpses through the small indoor window. Every morning the elder Dionne youngsters piled onto their mother’s bed to clap and exclaim with delight each time a nurse held up one of their baby sisters for inspection.
To the nurses, the daily ritual presented a charming scene. From Oliva and Elzire’s point of view, it illustrated all too literally their greatest objection to the guardianship agreement—the formation of a wall between the “old” and “new” families. Even under one roof, their children were divided. How would they continue to be a family when Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were moved to their own private hospital?
Oliva and Elzire’s misgivings were impossible to mask. “Parents are not quite sure what everything is about and are getting very suspicious of everyone,” Yvonne Leroux noted after the guardianship agreement was signed.
The nurses’ eagerness for the new hospital was every bit as apparent as the Dionnes’ dread. “The hospital is under way,” Nurse Leroux recorded on Monday, August 6. “The excavation is started and everyone is excited wondering what it’s going to be like.”
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That same week, the inadequacies of the Dionnes’ farmhouse made themselves clearer than ever. In the wee hours of Tuesday, August 7, Nurse Leroux was awakened by “a jumbling noise at the window.” Someone was trying to raise the pane from outside. Elzire heard it, too, and together they hurried into the nursery. Nurse Leroux li
fted the curtain and peered into the darkness. She saw nothing but thought she heard a movement in the pasture to the east of the house. Another of the babies’ caretakers “heard the noise of someone running and a bit later the sound of a motor car down the road,” the Toronto Star reported.
Although the incident was blamed on an overly curious tourist, it left the household badly shaken. Grandpa Dionne, “the watchdog of the household,” was furious. “The grandfather quivered with rage as he told of the marauding visit,” the Star observed. “He would, he repeated over and over…enjoy laying hands on the miscreants.”
Everyone’s thoughts flew to kidnapping, and ransom. Two years earlier, the baby son of America’s most famous aviator, Charles Lindbergh, had been snatched from his crib. The little boy’s body was found within six weeks, but the kidnapper, who’d demanded a $50,000 ransom, remained at large. No one said it aloud, “but that dread was in everyone’s mind.” Immediately, there was talk in the papers of adding a six-foot barbed-wire fence to the hospital, as well as a private telephone line direct to Dr. Dafoe in Callander so that the nurses could raise an alarm. It was rumored that the premier of Ontario himself would appoint a night watch over the farmhouse in the meantime. “Underneath the routine in nursery, front yard, kitchen, farm ran a current of fear,” the Star reported. Perhaps that collective nervousness led to what happened next.
“Calamity in nursery,” Nurse Leroux recorded on Wednesday. While puncturing holes in a fresh set of nipples for the babies’ bottles, Nurse de Kiriline tipped over the alcohol lamp she’d been using to sterilize the rubber. The alcohol spilled across the table and instantly ignited its soft cotton padding into blue flames. “She grabbed them all to her breast and ran out. I didn’t know what had happened till I heard her call ‘Yvonne!’ ”
Nurse de Kiriline’s uniform had caught fire. Yvonne Leroux snatched a bedspread from the bed and beat the flames from Nurse de Kiriline’s arms and legs. “Boss Number Two” suffered painful burns to her hands and ankle, but her instinctive reaction had saved the babies, and perhaps the entire Dionne household. It was over so quickly, no one in the house had been aware of what was happening.
That night, the prowlers returned. The farm’s isolation and lack of electricity made Nurse Leroux keenly aware of their vulnerability. Without streetlamps it was impossible to see anyone approaching, and so by Friday, a gas-powered Coleman lantern bright enough to illuminate an acre of field hung at each of the four corners of the Dionne farmhouse. “Any prowler daring those lights has a lot of nerve,” gloated Nurse Leroux. No chances would be taken with Ontario’s miracle babies. Two special constables were sworn in the next day, providing Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie with twenty-four-hour protection.
But even the constables could not guard against Dr. Dafoe’s latest worry: whooping cough. An epidemic had broken out in the district that week, and if Dafoe got his way, Oliva, Elzire, and their five elder children would be evicted from their own home to eliminate the slightest chance of their carrying the deadly sickness into the nursery. “The older, singly born Dionne young ones are being watched,” the Pittsburgh Press reported. “Two of them coughed last night. The sound created a minor emergency in the circle around the quintuplets. At the first whoop, out will go the older children and, indeed, the whole family.” It was against Dafoe’s wishes that Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline had returned to their home at all after their bout with bronchitis. “He grumbles daily about the possibility of infection in the crowded quarters of the story-and-a-half cottage,” the papers said. From where Dr. Dafoe stood, it was evident that every day the babies spent in a nursery with a sheet hanging across the doorway as their only barrier from germs put their lives at unnecessary risk.
On August 13, 1934, a delighted Nurse Leroux helped lay the cornerstone of the hospital that promised to alleviate all their worries. “Can you imagine just how thrilled we will all be to have a decent place to work in and not always be bumping into each other,” she wrote to her diary.
Oliva and Elzire did not share her excitement. Nor did they attend the cornerstone ceremony. Instead, they watched the festivities from an upstairs window that would become known as “the observation tower.” The public for the most part frowned on Mama and Papa Dionne’s absence, construing it as ingratitude. Few seemed to appreciate that the Dionnes were in an impossible position: indebted for the support that was continually saving their babies’ lives, yet already mourning their impending two-year separation from Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. They were also dismayed to learn that the building would be named for Dr. Dafoe rather than their daughters: the Dafoe Hospital for the Dionne Quintuplets.
“L’hôpital temporaire,” the Dionnes called it instead—the temporary hospital.
Every day, Ernest, Rose-Marie, and Thérèse clustered around the window under the eaves to watch the bungalow-style building take shape. The nine-room structure was a monument to the public’s boundless affection for their five baby sisters. Funds for its construction had come almost exclusively from a subscription drive sponsored by the Red Cross. Even families with virtually nothing to spare were proud to contribute. Nine-year-old Clair Aubin of Rhode Island put a nickel in the mail with a letter to Dafoe saying, “Dear Doctor: I am sending you five cents to put in the Dionne Hospital Fund. Would love to send you more but Daddy works only three days a week to keep us five going.”
Donations of lumber, log siding, roofing, insulation, plasterboard, hardwood flooring, and brass bathroom fixtures poured in from companies across Ontario. No convenience was spared. Wires for electricity and telephone service were strung from Callander all the way up the Corbeil road. Water pipes, too, complete with a private well and septic field. Red log cabin siding added a rustic touch to the otherwise thoroughly modern facility.
For some, contributing to the construction wasn’t enough—they actually wanted to own a piece of the hospital they’d helped build. “Scraps of wood and stone were speedily carried away as souvenirs by the many daily visitors,” the Toronto Star observed on a visit to the grounds in late August. The pebbles and splinters were more coveted than the picture postcards of the babies Grandpa Dionne offered for a quarter apiece.
When the curiosity-seekers dispersed and the workers went home for the night, Elzire Dionne crept across the road and quietly slipped Sacred Heart medals into the hospital’s unfinished walls.
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The next crisis seemed to come out of nowhere. “Look here!” Nurse Leroux said as she and Nurse de Kiriline were putting the babies to bed on September 11. “Feel how hot Yvonne is.” By nine o’clock her temperature registered 104.3 degrees. Cécile’s was creeping upward, too, and a rash was developing on both babies. The nurses sent Oliva into town for the doctor.
“We’ll give the baby an enema and put her in the Chicago incubator,” Dafoe decided after examining Yvonne. Her temperature peaked at 105 that night. Nurse Leroux and the night nurse, Pat Mullins, sponged her nervous, perspiring little body in hopes of staving off convulsions.
The next day, Cécile’s and Émilie’s temperatures shot up. Marie and finally Annette followed suit the day after that. Their fevers were frightening, their diapers filled with green curdles. Dr. Dafoe diagnosed intestinal toxemia.
Dafoe and the nursing staff were confounded. “I became convinced that our aseptic technique had slipped badly,” Dr. Dafoe remembered. But how? They had taken every precaution to keep germs from crossing the nursery threshold. Finally they pinpointed a most unlikely culprit: the babies’ clean laundry.
Their diapers ought to have been boiled—every one of them. But with eighty diapers a day to launder, someone had opted for a shortcut. Only the soiled diapers were being properly sterilized. The wet ones were scrubbed in soap and hot water. Then all of them, boiled or unboiled, were stacked in a cardboard box without a lid. In the nursery, that open b
ox would have posed minimal risk. In an outdoor shed, with the windows propped open and flies passing freely between the barnyard and the babies’ laundry, it had become a breeding ground for disease.
For three days and nights the nurses battled to keep Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and especially Marie from losing all the ground they’d worked so hard to gain over the last three months as the infection wreaked havoc on their miniature bodies. At 7 pounds, 11.5 ounces, Yvonne was barely more than half the size of a normal three-month-old. Marie, at 5 pounds, 4.5 ounces, was still smaller than a typical newborn. “Babes are all losing weight and look so deathly ill,” Nurse Leroux wrote on September 12. The next day, Marie would not eat at all. Annette, usually the hardiest, frightened the nurses more than any of her sisters when her fever blazed to 105.1 degrees.
“That whole time was a nightmare,” Nurse de Kiriline remembered. “The senior Dionnes paced the floor outside the nursery and bombarded us with anxious questions. We pitied them but could give them no assurance.”
“Babes still sick; the smallest ones look dreadful,” Nurse Leroux reported on September 14. “They are waxen and their faces are drawn. If they only pull through this.” It was the day of the hospital’s dedication ceremony. Across the street, a crowd of several hundred listened to Dr. Dafoe thank everyone from Mrs. Dionne to the government of Ontario for making the hospital possible, while inside the Dionnes’ parlor the nurses silently despaired. “The situation did not bear discussion,” Nurse de Kiriline recalled, “but on every face you saw the same thought written. Would we ever carry these babies to their new home?”
