The Quintland Sisters(13)
Father Strives to Break Contract to Show Tots in Chicago
CORBEIL, Ontario—Marie, the most delicate of the Dionne quintuplets, had a bad night. Her heart action was weak and about 4am today it seemed as though it might stop altogether. Fears are felt for her life.
“I was afraid for a little while something was going to happen to her,” Marie Clouthier, the nurse in charge, told the Star. “She got so blue we had to give her a little rum as a stimulant.”
Today Dr. Dafoe emerged from the home after his early visit minus the smile that was so evident yesterday. “They are still all alive,” he said. “That’s about all I can say. They are so awfully small. Every time I see them they seem even smaller. They are the tiniest babies I have ever seen live.”
All children were fed throughout the night, at two-hour intervals, human milk obtained by the Canadian Red Cross Society.
Dr. Dafoe will charge the Dionne family just $15 for delivering the quintuplets. This fee will include the ever-watchful care and the many calls at the three-roomed farmhouse made by the tireless country doctor in his so-far successful fight to keep life in the five infants.
Meantime Oliva Dionne, the father, is making strenuous efforts to break the contract which may eventually put his wife and babes on public view in the main lane of Chicago’s world fair midway. On Thursday, Dionne travelled 133 miles to Orillia and signed his first contract. Today he sent his first telegram. It implored Ivan Spears, sideshow maestro, to relieve him of the option taken on his babes. The answer was quick to flash back: “Nothing doing: you are signed to a legal document.”
Offers continue to pour in on the bewildered father and his padre manager. No sooner had they signed the Spear’s [sic] option than telegrams of astonished protest came from near and far. At the same time, a Chicago night club operator wired an offer guaranteeing a minimum of $500 a week with all expenses and offering to post a $10,000 cash bond with any bank named if mother and babes could be persuaded to bed down in his joy cave for 20 weeks. They were not persuaded.
Used with permission.
June 29, 1934
Nothing is happening by halves these days, not the birth of the quintuplets, not summer, which rushed headlong to meet spring so fast the smelly swarms of shad flies have already come and gone. There was scarcely time for the bees to buzz about the blossoms before the strawberries were out and not a single quiet moment for me to write things down. I feel like I blinked and the wind turned the page on my own life and now I’m in a completely different chapter.
All through my exams I kept going out to the farmhouse whenever I could, hardly making any effort to do well on my tests. The babies have filled out considerably this month but are still tiny and frail. Dr. Dafoe has appreciated my help, I think, and the other nurses, for the most part, are treating me as if I’ve come with the territory, which indeed I did.
Last week Ivy, who could coax a whisker from a cat, convinced Nurse de Kiriline to pay me two dollars a week as a part-time “nurse’s assistant,” and Dr. Dafoe has agreed. He’s said that there must be two staff on duty at all times, around the clock, so there’s plenty need for me when one of the nurses, orderlies, or housekeepers requires a few hours off.
The Dionne farmhouse is almost unrecognizable now. Nurse de Kiriline has had a second door cut into the back of the building so that the Dionne family can come and go from the upstairs room without tramping through the kitchen. Dr. Dafoe has declared the kitchen must remain off-limits to the other children because of the risk of germs.
Outside, a rough shack has been thrown together next to the farmhouse as a dormitory for the nurses, and the fence around the property has been extended two feet higher to keep out nosy visitors. We still have no electricity—M. Dionne has flatly refused, even when the government offered to pay for it, calling it a fire hazard. Instead we must put up with the steady drumming of the generator, chugging away as if with a heartbeat of its own. The privy is still out back, but Nurse de Kiriline has insisted on having a water line brought to the kitchen to provide a steady supply for our kettles. Every single scrap of cotton, cloth, bib, or diaper that so much as touches one of the babies gets washed and boiled after the lightest use.
Boss Number Two has brought to the nursery an almost military precision. Ivy and I have taken to calling her the Captain—although not to her face, of course. Ivy nearly got caught saluting her behind her back yesterday. She can put me in stitches with some of her funny faces and horseplay, but she wouldn’t dare do it in front of Nurse de Kiriline. The Captain has an accent and a clipped manner of speaking that make you feel as if she’s snipped off the second half of whatever it was she’d been about to say. She’ll tell you to do such and such a task, but she’ll say it so abruptly, with so little intonation, that you’ll linger for a moment expecting her to say more. Then you realize she is finished, and there you are, standing around like a half-wit rather than snapping to the job at hand.
Ever since the uproar over the contract he signed with the Chicago promoters, Papa Dionne never pokes his head into our side of the farmhouse unless something is specifically needed of him. The entire country is furious with him, or that’s what you’d think if you read the papers or listened to all the people who keep arriving every day along this quiet stretch of road. Even Mme. Dionne, who was still on bed rest when she learned about the Chicago deal, went into such a fit we were worried she might not recover.