The Quintland Sisters(24)
“Does this mean the girls will stay living here, at the Dafoe Nursery?” Ivy asked the Captain.
Nurse de Kiriline gave a curt nod. “That is the current plan,” she said, “but the act also carries the provision that the quintuplets will be reunited with their family at such a time as their health and well-being are stable enough to allow integration.”
I glanced around the cheerful dining room, with its smooth white walls and tall windows. Ivy and the other nurses have hung bright paintings of animals and sea creatures, and the early-morning sun making its way into the room gave everything a warm glow.
As for the rest of the week, everything ticked along so nicely. Mr. Davis came at 10:00 A.M. every day to take his photographs of the babies. He was charming with both me and Ivy equally, which is kind of him, because it’s no secret where his interests lie. He and Ivy are very familiar with one another now, after all these months of mornings together. Mr. Davis can be a bit of a tease, or maybe that’s what all men are like in the city? I’ve no idea. He asked me whether I’d found myself a handsome doctor up at St. Joseph’s who was going to whisk me away from the Dafoe Nursery before I’d even managed to properly come back. I blushed so deeply my birthmark must have been pulsing blue-black. Fortunately Ivy came to my rescue.
“Mr. Davis! You should be ashamed of yourself. You can’t be talking that way in front of these young ladies.” She was referring, of course, to the five babies scrambling around on their hands and knees and getting up to all sorts of mischief if you didn’t keep an eye on them, all of them, every minute of the day. She might just as well have been talking about me, however. I don’t think I said more than five words to a doctor at the hospital that weren’t directly related to our lessons. And I know for a fact not one of them noticed me.
Dr. Dafoe and the Captain are still insisting that the babies nap outdoors, at least when the sun is shining, bundled up against the cold. But under no circumstances is naptime to be disturbed by people rattling at the fence. Instead, the doctor has announced that visitors may tour through the Dafoe Nursery, from the front door to the back, in order to catch a glimpse of the babies playing through the two large interior windows separating the corridor from the nursery. I had assumed these were placed in order to allow more light into the corridor. Now I wonder if Dr. Dafoe hadn’t anticipated the need to accommodate curious visitors back when the nursery and hospital were in their earliest planning stages.
It is the strangest thing. There must be two or three hundred visitors per day pulling up in cars having driven from heaven knows where to see the quintuplets. And more are arriving by train. George Leroux, Ivy’s father, has quit his job at the mill and has started a taxi service charging people fifty cents to drive from the Callander train station out to the nursery and back again, making dozens of trips a day. Visitors now come shuffling through the doors during playtime, peering through the windows at us, pointing and gasping at the slightest thing. The guards on duty tell them in no uncertain terms that they must not tap at the windows, or call out to the girls, or make any funny faces to get their attention, but many do it anyway. It seems it’s impossible to get them to stop.
The girls notice, of course, and are distracted from their capers. Today a tall, lumpy woman in a green dress, which made her look like a string bean, had to be pried away from the window by one of the policemen after she locked eyes with Annette and started sobbing, inconsolably.
“Ba-ba-bah,” Annette mumbled, pointing at the woman. When her sisters ignored her, she crawled to the chair where I was sitting and tugged at the hem of my skirt, repeating herself more urgently. “Ba-ba-bah!”
We’ve all commented that the girls play differently when there are no prying eyes. They smile more and are calmer. We, too, no doubt. For my part, I try to find tasks to do outside the playroom during observation hours. I hate the idea of so many strangers seeing my birthmark and commenting on it, wondering how someone who looks like me could be allowed to work with these miraculous babies.
Everyone who visits takes a stone, just as Ivy told me. Dr. Dafoe has arranged for the eldest Dionne child to be paid ten cents to fill a bucket with little stones each morning, and it is positioned at the back door of the nursery along with a sign that says GOOD LUCK STONES. And sure enough, people are helping themselves to the pebbles when they leave. Mother and Father finally came out to the nursery to see the babies. I didn’t walk with them through the observation corridor, but Ivy and I popped out to see them when they had passed through. Father was in good humor for a change. He helped himself to a stone and passed it to Mother, saying, “We all could use a bit more luck now, couldn’t we?”
Mother was still exclaiming about the nursery and all of its modern conveniences—I think she was more impressed by the kitchen than she was by the babies—but she dropped the stone in her purse.
“You might find those stones bring you more than good luck,” Ivy said, her brown eyes twinkling. I elbowed her in the ribs. Father gave her a strange look, but I shooed them toward the front gate, where other townsfolk were climbing back into Mr. Leroux’s bus.
Back in my tiny room at the dormitory, I’m still wearing my winter coat in the hope that my room will warm up—a lost cause. I think I’ll need to leave off my writing and climb into bed. I’m fed up with winter and ready for spring. It’s snowing again outside, fat, heavy flakes that look like they might turn to rain by morning. Or that’s the hope.