The Quintland Sisters(103)
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 Bay. 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.
The Quintland Sisters has another lesson, I think, about people serving on the margins of celebrity. What happens to Emma in the novel is entirely fictional, but it’s not implausible: as modern-day events have made all too clear, the brighter the spotlight, the darker the shadows. Emma’s story, I hope, gives voice to women hushed and swept aside when their complaints are at odds with the feel-good story in the public eye.