by Sarah Miller
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Three days later, the Dionne household breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was clear that all five babies would recover, though they had lost weeks of progress in a matter of days. Thin, weak, and anemic, the infants, with their feeble immune systems, had been taxed to the limit. “It was evident to us all that the babies must have fresh air, safety from the sources of infection, and sunshine if they were to survive,” Nurse de Kiriline said.
A week after the dedication ceremony, Dr. Dafoe looked the babies over and said to Nurse de Kiriline, “We’ve got to move them today.”
“Do we dare?” she asked. There had been talk of it the day before; some of the babies’ things had even been moved across the street in anticipation, but now it was raining, and the furnace was not up and running.
“We don’t dare keep them here,” Dafoe answered. “There’s a chance for them over there. Get everything ready.”
Oliva and Elzire resisted. “Naturally, they were afraid,” Nurse de Kiriline said. “They, too, had seen the shadow of death in those five little faces. They knew as we did that the hospital was not ready.” There was no furniture, no pots or pans to thaw the babies’ milk and sterilize their bottles. The water and electricity had not been hooked up yet.
Dr. Dafoe held firm. It was a bold move. If anything happened—if one of the babies suffered or died after being transferred out of their warm home and through the rain to the unfinished hospital—the whole world would be at his throat.
The Dionnes and the nurses fretted while plumbers and steamfitters hustled to connect pipes and light a fire in the furnace across the street. At one o’clock, word came that the nursery needed just one more hour to heat up. “The radiators began to warm the air and, with the chill off, everybody’s spirits shot up,” Nurse de Kiriline remembered.
Everyone except Elzire and Oliva, that is. The separation they had dreaded since July was suddenly upon them. Elzire could not bear even to watch the nurses begin folding up her babies’ clothes. She begged Oliva to take her out of the house until it was over.
“It was a cold, rainy, miserable day,” Oliva recalled. “The sky wept and we wept. Where we drove I do not know.”
While the Dionnes motored aimlessly up and down the sodden countryside, Nurse de Kiriline directed the final preparations, ensuring that a hot-water bottle was tucked into each waiting cot at the hospital while Nurse Leroux stayed behind to ready Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. The babies did not have the vitality to resist the strange breach of routine. They lay without fussing on the big table while Nurse Leroux wrapped them in blankets, leaving only their faces showing, then did what she could to return the Dionnes’ parlor to its former state.
Around two o’clock, two cars with the heat roaring at full blast pulled to a stop in front of the farmhouse. Nurse Leroux picked up Yvonne. Nurse de Kiriline carried Annette. Aunt Laurence Clusiaux and Uncle Lias Legros took the bundles that were Cécile and Émilie. “The Little Doctor followed with the fifth roll. He had reserved for himself the privilege of carrying Marie.”
“We stood at the door a moment—the doctor, the housekeeper, we three nurses—each with a baby so carefully swathed that it resembled a cocoon more than a baby,” Nurse de Kiriline said of that pivotal moment. “We looked back once at the dreary room in which we had spent such anxious months and then we carried the quintuplets out into the open.”
When the Dionnes returned to face the empty nursery, Elzire was so choked with emotion, she felt as though she were suffocating. Standing in the doorway with “eyes that had been wrung dry,” she told her husband, “This will never seem like home again—without our petites. It is a house divided.”
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“If we had expected drama,” Nurse de Kiriline said of the nerve-wracking hundred-yard journey across the Corbeil road to the Dafoe Hospital, “we did not get it.” All five babies slept through the entire trip without so much as blinking as they were slipped into their warm cots.
Instead, the nurses were the ones who were shocked by the change. The lighting in the Dionne house had been so poor, de Kiriline said, that looking at the babies in the bright new nursery was like seeing them for the first time. “Those children were as pale as poor little ghosts. Marie and Émilie were even worse than pale. Their color was a ghastly green.” All at once the nurses realized how perilous the situation had been.
“For Dr. Dafoe to move those babies just when he did was the bravest thing I ever knew a doctor to do,” Nurse de Kiriline later said. The way the nurses would eventually tell it, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were on the verge of death when he decided they must leave the farmhouse. “The day of the moving they were hot with fever, their faces were of a livid paleness, they were indeed sick, almost dying babies,” Nurse de Kiriline claimed in 1936. Only a last-ditch effort to whisk them into the fresh, sterile hospital could save them from the ravages of intestinal toxemia, so her version went.
It was a dramatic story, a satisfying story complete with a heroic doctor and a miraculous ending in which the babies’ fevers broke just hours after crossing the hospital’s threshold. “As if by the touch of a fairy’s wand,” the usually levelheaded de Kiriline wrote, within a week the five critically ill infants “turned the corner towards blossoming bright-eyed babyhood.” Most importantly for the doctor and nurses, it was a story that left no room to doubt the necessity of removing the children from their family’s home. There was just one problem: it wasn’t true.
No one, not even Oliva and Elzire Dionne, would deny that the hospital played a tremendous role in reviving their daughters’ health, but the fact of the matter is that by September 17, all five were considered “much improved,” “fine,” or “very good.” Still, Dafoe waited four days more before risking the hospital transfer on September 21. “In general their condition is satisfactory,” he told the Nugget that afternoon.
What prompted the move more than anything was the resurgence of the local whooping cough epidemic. With infection sweeping the countryside, Dr. Dafoe realized he could not chance keeping five fragile premature infants in the Dionne home any longer, especially not in their weakened state. Though Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were not dying that day, they were stranded in a sort of no-man’s-land, too feeble to do anything but simply exist.
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The hospital granted the babies the opportunity to truly thrive for the first time in their lives, and true to form, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie grasped it eagerly. “In short,” Nurse de Kiriline said, “they took up life again after so nearly giving it up forever and the happiness in their new little log house was a thing that could be felt.”
The front room, stretching the full width of the building, belonged entirely to the babies. Sunlight poured in through a row of six tall southern windows, illuminating the apple-green walls and ivory trim. A line of five small bed tables and five ivory cots painted with pink wreaths and hung with holy medals took up the center of the room. A little wooden “pet” was clamped to the bars of each crib: a puppy for Yvonne, a squirrel for Annette, a rooster for Cécile, a rabbit for Émilie, and a goose for Marie. To one side of the front door stood the nurses’ table, with its new padding and white enamel bowls full of bathing and diaper-changing supplies. Stacks of diapers, dresses, and shirts warmed on a radiator within easy reach. On the other side was the big new sun bunk Nurse de Kiriline had contrived. It looked rather like a drawer on stilts, with a cushioned bottom broad enough to hold five babies at once, and sides seven or eight inches high to keep them from tumbling out onto the floor. The nurses irreverently christened it “the rats’ nest.”
All day long, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie sprawled in this play box, drenched in sunshine from the open windows. As if fresh air and sunlight were a kind of tonic, the f
ive-month-olds “soon became vigorously kicking youngsters with an omnivorous curiosity for everything within sight and later on within reach.” Their cheeks turned “the exact shade of the old-fashioned cinnamon rose,” and their plumping limbs “a light biscuit-tan.” It was a beguiling sight, that brimful box of squirming babies “with their dark velvety sparkling eyes and their rosy glow of healthfulness,” the five of them as alike as a string of paper dolls.
Their budding personalities were emerging ever more strongly. The most flirtatious of the babies, Yvonne had developed a particular enthusiasm that set her apart from the others. “Whatever she does is done with all her might, from tantrums to pat-a-cakes,” Nurse de Kiriline said of her. Usually the first to learn new tricks—like wrinkling her nose—she practiced them all by herself. Nurse Leroux had also discovered that Yvonne had three extra-long hairs they could use to distinguish her from her sisters if all else failed.
Annette was the fearless one, most inclined to “scrap” with the others. “She is interested in everything and likes innovations. She is also intensely interested in the effect on others of what she does,” said Nurse de Kiriline. Nurse Leroux still considered Annette the prettiest, finding something inexplicably appealing in the squareness of her jawline.
Round-faced Cécile remained the most serene and the least likely to cry—even when Annette tussled with her. “Almost the most upset she ever got was when she couldn’t pick the red roses off her quilt,” Nurse de Kiriline recalled. It was in Cécile’s nature to become engrossed in a problem, working at it until she’d seen it through.
Émilie’s liveliness earned her the position of “athlete of the crowd,” always eager to join in whatever her sisters were doing. “She never needs more than the merest invitation to play,” Nurse de Kiriline observed. “She screams with laughter at the very suggestion of a frolic.” According to Nurse Leroux, Émilie had the pointiest chin.
Independent and imperious little Marie was Émilie’s opposite. She always seemed a bit separate from the busy flock of babies, either taking her own sweet time, or demanding that her desires be instantly fulfilled. The glow of bright lights or bright objects could captivate her contemplative soul for hours. “To make her laugh and frolic was a hard job but we succeeded in doing it,” said Nurse de Kiriline.
As the babies bloomed, so did the nurses’ affection for them. “You felt as though you wanted to give them the moon,” Nurse de Kiriline confessed. “I have often been asked if any one is my favorite. I answer that the last of those babies you pick up is your favorite, but perhaps I picked up oftenest Annette and Émilie.” Nurse Leroux still favored Yvonne, while relief nurse Pat Mullins had a soft spot for Marie.
Dr. Dafoe delighted in the babies every bit as much as the nurses. “Hello, bums!” he called out to them as he entered the nursery each day. “How’s my gang this morning?” As one journalist who reported regularly on the goings-on at the Dafoe Hospital recalled, “his voice, his smile, his eyes made the words more affectionate than a dictionaryful of ‘dears’ and ‘darlings.’ ”
“I know of no greater treat in the world,” Dafoe himself said, “than the one I receive when I enter the Quintuplets’ nursery every morning and see such a rare collection of smiling, healthy babies.” Thanks to the pictures in the papers and the newsreel films in the theaters, the whole world could see just how healthy Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were growing, and they worshipped Dafoe for his part in it. “It never occurred to us that they belonged anywhere else but in what we considered to be a lovely little hospital right across the street,” said quintuplet fan Genia Goelz. “We accepted Dr. Dafoe, and the whole way that the thing was managed, absolutely. In fact, we admired it.”
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While the hospital ministered to the babies’ physical well-being, the board of four guardians—Dr. Dafoe, local merchant Ken Morrison, William Alderson of the Red Cross, and Grandpa Olivier Dionne—were seeing to it that Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie would enjoy lifelong financial security as well. Together the guardians were managing a trust fund that was growing as fat and as promising as the babies themselves.
Every newspaper snapshot and every frame of newsreel footage meant money in the bank. That summer of 1934, Fred Davis, the Toronto Star photographer, negotiated an exclusive contract to photograph the five sisters for the Newspaper Enterprise Association. The $10,000 the NEA paid to the quintuplet trust fund guaranteed that no one else in the world—not even Oliva and Elzire Dionne—would be permitted to photograph the Dionne Quintuplets for the next year. Pathé News deposited between $12,000 and $15,000 in royalties to the trust fund for every quintuplet newsreel it made. The right to print a single magazine photograph cost $150—the modern equivalent of $2,500 in US currency. Everyone from Lysol to Karo corn syrup, Carnation milk, and Palmolive soap wanted Yvonne’s, Annette’s, Cécile’s, Émilie’s, and Marie’s darling faces on their advertisements, and was willing to pay thousands of dollars for the privilege. The Madame Alexander Doll Company’s Dionne Quintuplet Dolls were such fiercely coveted Christmas gifts that the girls’ share of the profits—just 5 percent of the total sales—easily amounted to over $25,000. By the time the five little girls turned twenty-one, the guardians confidently predicted, they would be millionaires.
Across the road at the Dionne farmhouse that fall and winter, the mood was entirely different.
“That was a sad time,” neighbor Yvette Boyce recalled. “I remember my mom saying that Mrs. Dionne would cry every day for the girls.” Sometimes, if the wind was just right, Elzire could hear her children’s voices drifting across the road.
Elzire missed her five baby girls right down to her bones, yet, as she herself said, “I would sooner do a big washing than go to the hospital.” Official policy was that she and Oliva were welcome to visit their daughters at all hours of the day or night, anytime they pleased, so long as no one in their own household was ill. In reality, the Dionnes never felt welcome on Dafoe’s turf. The hospital, in the words of a sympathetic reporter, was “a luxurious fortress,” and the doctor and his staff focused with such intensity on keeping Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie safe and healthy that they seemed to have no regard for how their rules and attitudes would affect the babies’ family.
Security procedures made no exceptions for Oliva and Elzire. The babies’ parents had to ring a bell at the gate and wait for the guard to let them inside. Once in the nursery itself, they were never granted private time with their children. A nurse always remained in the room, probably due more to lack of tact on the part of Leroux and de Kiriline than to any concern for the babies’ safety. Nevertheless, their constant presence unnerved Elzire by exuding the impression that she could not be trusted with her own children—“like we had committed some crime,” as she put it.
When at last she was permitted to lend a hand with her daughters’ baths, Elzire was so intimidated by the nurses’ stern gaze that her usually capable hands fumbled. “She looked down at the adorable children she had brought into the world and she asked herself, ‘Are these really my children?’ ” her husband recalled. Thinking such a thought was enough to overwhelm Elzire’s emotions, and she’d flee to weep and pray in privacy. “She could only approach them timidly, in fear, like a stranger,” Oliva said.
Tourists, on the other hand, were not the least bit timid about approaching the Dafoe Hospital. They came by the hundreds, parking along the fence and peering through the woven wire in hopes of catching a glimpse of the famous babies. Signs along the Corbeil road reading No Admittance to the Dionne Quintuplets did not discourage them. Every day, no matter the temperature, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie were bundled into pink chinchilla coats and wheeled out onto the porch in their draft-proof carriages for a fresh-air nap, and anyone lucky enough to snag a front-row spot on the fence line could see it happen. Folks drove out of their way just t
o stop and see five frosted curls of breath rising up from the carriages, Nurse de Kiriline remembered.
It was not unusual for Elzire to have to elbow her way through a crowd on her way to and from the hospital, a phenomenon Elzire felt magnified the distance between herself and her daughters. “They belong to them,” she said of the tourists, “not to us.”
Oliva did his best to comfort her. “That is not so,” he said. “These people are friends who come to see our children. Perhaps in time they will know how we feel, how hard it is for us.”
The mobs of curious visitors hardly showed the Dionne family common courtesy, much less any sympathy. Locked doors and drawn shades just barely held them at bay. One man smashed a kitchen windowpane and reached inside, badly frightening little Pauline as she sat playing on the floor by the sink. “Kodak pests” constantly angling to snap pictures made it impossible for Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, and Pauline to romp in the yard, so Oliva converted the old milk shed into a playhouse for them. He also rigged up Elzire’s clothesline with a pulley that reached into the house, so that she need not face the hordes of strangers to hang her wash out to dry. On the rare occasions when she ventured out, Elzire hid behind a clump of bushes in the kitchen garden while Ernest flung clods of dirt at the perpetual crowd of fifty or more tourists who shouted questions through the gap beneath the twelve-foot fence. Oliva fell into the habit of simply not looking at anyone. “He keeps his eyes downward and tries desperately to see as little as possible of what is going on around him,” noted the Boston Globe. His demeanor made Oliva appear so unapproachable that his closest friends stopped greeting him on the streets. Even Auntie Legros’s visits to the Dionne farm tapered off.
“As the weeks passed our despondency increased,” Oliva said. “It was not only we who were now so definitely cut off from the babies. Our other children felt, too, that there was a barrier between them and their little sisters, and they were puzzled.”
