The Quintland Sisters(11)
“There you are, thank goodness,” Ivy said, opening the door a mere gap, grasping my arm, and pulling me in. Her eyes were heavy, her expression pinched, and her uniform smudged and wilted. The kitchen smelled of woodsmoke, kerosene, and the sour tang of hot work.
“Have you even gone home?” I asked.
She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m going later today. Dr. Dafoe has organized for full-time help from the Red Cross. They should be here tonight.”
I went first to the babies in the canopied box by the fire, Yvonne and Annette. They were tiny as ever, their little fists stirring the air like sewing bobbins, toes like raisins. I crossed the room to the incubator and peered through the glass. Cécile, Marie, and émilie were no better off, wriggling weakly against one another in their wooden den. A tall cylindrical tank, which I guessed to be the new oxygen supply, stood by the box, a hose snaking into a fixture on its side.
“We almost lost Marie last night.” Ivy sighed. “She stops breathing within three minutes when she’s out of the incubator. We’re giving her rum in her milk every two hours to stimulate her heart, but she is hanging by a thread. Cécile is not much better off.”
I started washing the kettles, pots, and a growing mound of soiled cottons. Claudette, the local girl who’d been hired to help, had not yet come in. “She’s terrified of M. Dionne, I’ve noticed,” Ivy said glumly. “God knows what he said to her. I sent her to fetch him from the stables last night when Mme. Dionne was asking for him, but he took forever to come in, and said he’d sent Claudette home.”
Not too much later, Dr. Dafoe arrived, bobbing up the steps like a cork in water. He had with him a handsome, imposing woman he introduced as Nurse Louise de Kiriline—Scandinavian, I gather, although her French is impeccable. She has large, pronounced teeth, unruly dark hair, and eyes that are such a deep shade of brown it’s difficult to discern her pupils, giving her a very tense and hungry look. Her eyebrows, thick and pointy, are set quite high up her forehead, as if they, too, are irked and a little bewildered by the intensity of her expression.
Dr. Dafoe gathered Nurse Clouthier, Ivy, me, and the orderly, Mrs. Nells, and said in no uncertain terms that the quintuplets had no chance of surviving if we did not create some new rules.
“I am Boss Number One,” he said in a booming voice, loud enough for Mme. Dionne to hear it, along with anyone else who might have been upstairs at the time. “Nurse de Kiriline is Boss Number Two. Her rules are my rules and must be followed.”
With Nurse de Kiriline at his side, Dr. Dafoe examined the babies one by one, making little clucking sounds.
“Completely identical,” he told her, and showed her the ribbons tied around the right ankle of each baby, labeled with the first letter of her name. “To avoid any possible confusion,” he said.
This made me smile. They all looked similar, of course, but there was no way I could have confused any one of them for another. To me they were so easily distinguishable, not only by their tiny quirks—Annette’s eyes, Marie’s hair—but even their little cries. If you listened properly, you could hear it.
Dr. Dafoe departed shortly thereafter, and Nurse de Kiriline swept into action.
“These”—she pointed at the heavy drapes in the sitting room off the kitchen—“these must go.”
Mme. Dionne is still poorly, but at her insistence had been moved upstairs to her own bed the previous evening. Now the bed used for her confinement was taken apart and rebuilt into additional shelving in the kitchen to hold the medical supplies, baby clothes, and linens that had been steadily arriving from various cities in Ontario, Quebec, and south of the border. A sideboard, a couch, and an upholstered chair were all pushed against a far wall, and the wide-plank pine table that had clearly been put to considerable use by the large Dionne family was repurposed as a changing table in the middle of the kitchen, now dubbed the nursery. The heavy curtains gone, Nurse de Kiriline had us pin muslin netting tightly against the open windows to supply a steady breeze and keep out the clouds of blackflies and mosquitoes. We hung another white sheet in the open doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room, which Nurse de Kiriline declared a charting space for the nursing staff. Any vases, trivets, crucifixes, and figurines—anything not appropriate or usable for either an office or a nursery—were sent upstairs or out to the dusty porch.
When the heavy work was done, we took hot water and Lysol and scrubbed the floors, walls, and ceilings. By the time Dr. Dafoe returned, later in the day, his breast puffed out like a robin’s, to inform us that another incubator was on its way from Toronto, the Dionne farmhouse had been transformed. M. Dionne, presumably skulking around with a hundred-dollar check burning a hole in his pocket, was nowhere to be seen.
“You.” Nurse de Kiriline pointed at me as I helped Ivy oil the babies. In the long hours we’d been reorganizing the farmhouse, she had yet to say a word to me. “You are not a nurse, I gather. An orderly?”
“No,” I told her, blushing. “Dr. Dafoe has asked me to help out because I speak French and English.”
In fact, it was Ivy who had repeatedly asked me to stay and help, although I was mostly there of my own accord.
“I was here at the birth,” I added.
Nurse de Kiriline nodded, almost imperceptibly. “I’m happy to have your help,” she said briskly, then turned away.