The Quintland Sisters(35)
May 10, 1936
I SHOWED LEWIS and his father some of my sketches of Edith once they’d brought me back to the nursery. Very rough work, but I think I captured her quite nicely—it’s enough that I can keep working on something larger back at the nursery, if I get the chance. Lewis was very complimentary, and I promised to show him some of my work of the quintuplets another time. It seems he actually knows something about drawing, which I hadn’t expected.
He helped me ferry my things back to the kitchen door, and I asked if he’d taught art when he was a schoolteacher. He blushed almost as red as my birthmark and said he’d taught mathematics and physics, but only as a substitute teacher. I must have looked confused: his father has told me several times that Lewis studied to be a schoolteacher.
He cast a look at the truck, where his father sat waiting. Standing with my bags and cases made him look even more lanky than usual, the cuffs of the shirt beneath his dusty overalls straining to reach his bony wrists. He stooped to set down my things, lowering his soft voice even further, but when he spoke it was clear as a bell, his stammer gone.
“I actually studied engineering at the University of Toronto,” he said. “I specialized in aeronautics. My dream was to build airplanes.”
I was astonished by this declaration, but knew better than to say anything. He straightened himself up again, his face creased. “Father thinks, if I build airplanes, I will want to fly them, and he saw a lot of what happens to pilots in the war. In the end he convinced me to turn to teaching instead, saying there’d be more work for teachers than engineers.”
I looked up, and he managed a smile. Lewis has one of those faces that is entirely changed by smiling—the bones of his long face shift so that his cheekbones bounce upward and out, making wide dimples. “Turns out there’s not much work for teachers either,” he said.
“Have you been up in an airplane?”
He nodded, smiling wider.
“Wasn’t it terrifying?”
He nodded again. “Terrifying and wonderful.”
May 29, 1936 (La Voix)
* * *
BIRTHDAY BROADCAST RINGS OUT AROUND THE WORLD
Babies’ Wealth Approaches $500,000
CALLANDER, Ontario—A special radio crew and celebrity commentator, Frazier Hunt, were the only visitors allowed into the Dafoe Nursery for the much-anticipated second birthday of the Dionne Quintuplets. Visitors and dignitaries were turned away and, with the rest of the world, could only listen to how the celebrations played out over the radio. And what did this sound like? Why, that was émilie blasting on the tinhorn, Yvonne on the drums, and rascally Cécile tugging on the microphone cord while Dr. Dafoe tried to say his piece. It was not until Nurse Yvonne Leroux began to sing a quaint French folksong that the Quints fell into line and did a little dance, raising their plump arms in the air and spinning this way and that, their petticoats flaring.
The Dionne parents were not in attendance although they, too, received a gift today: a cheque to the tune of $1,000, paid them by the guardians. Minister of Welfare, Mr. David Croll, citing a new film contract signed on behalf of the babies, announced today that the coffers of the Dionne Quints have now reached half a million dollars and that this estate belongs to the Dionne family as a whole and not the Quints alone.
“I convey the government’s congratulations to Mr. and Mrs. Oliva Dionne. These are their babies—we have never forgotten that fact. The important thing is that the children are here in the nursery specifically designed for their particular needs: that they have never been moved from the safety of Callander, never exploited nor cheapened, available always to their parents, who can—and do—visit them daily. . . . We would like everyone in Canada and the United States to come and visit them this summer.”
In the newly signed contract, the Twentieth Century Fox will pay $250,000 for the rights to the next three feature pictures featuring the children, to be completed before the end of 1938. Another $50,000 will be paid in two years, in addition to the 10 per cent royalties the babies will receive from the net receipts from each picture. Thursday’s new movie contract brought the quintuplets’ cash on hand to $450,000, with more waiting in the wings.
June 5, 1936
Marie-Jeanne Lebel and Mme. Legros, the midwives who allowed me to stay the fateful night the quintuplets were born, have done the most astonishing thing. They have opened a souvenir stand just down the road toward Corbeil on a street-facing corner of the Legros property. Ivy convinced me to go and see it today. It is an enormous two-story structure with an open-air restaurant upstairs and shop on the bottom, topped with a sign that says MIDWIVES’ PAVILION: REFRESHMENTS AND SOUVENIRS FROM THE MIDWIVES OF THE DIONNE QUINTUPLETS.
We wandered around the shop and gawked at all of the trinkets you can buy featuring our five babies. Etchings, postcards, spoons, cups, plates, bibs, baby bonnets and booties, tea towels, thimbles, hairbrushes, coasters, and candy bars, all of them adorned with the five faces of Annette, Yvonne, Cécile, Marie, and émilie. They even had a slim pamphlet that they were selling for fifty cents detailing the night of the birth entitled “Administering Angels to the Dionne Quintuplets.”
They both recognized us from that harrowing first week, but neither was particularly warm, although Mme. Lebel asked in her deep, minty voice about my mother and baby Edith. Neither of them is delivering babies anymore, they said. They are busy enough here, clearly, with all of the visitors stampeding through the doors.