The Quintland Sisters(50)
Imagine what Lewis, lover of all things aeronautical, will say when I tell him I met the famous Miss Amelia Earhart!
May 1, 1937
DR. DAFOE’S NEW secretary arrived today, a dapper young man named George Sinclair, who will work here at the nursery, in Dr. Dafoe’s expanded office. The doctor says Mr. Sinclair’s primary concerns will be handling correspondence and helping with a number of columns the doctor now contributes to newspapers in Canada and the United States. We are to give him full access to the girls’ medical records that we keep for Dr. Blatz, as well as the freedom to observe them at play, indoors and out.
Mr. Sinclair is in his early twenties, I’d say, mild mannered, and clearly awestruck by the quintuplets. “Bo-jo,” they greeted him, then cheerfully persuaded him to join their game, which involved him lying facedown on the floor while they piled their toys on top of him, leaving his jacket and trousers—expensive, by the look of it—much rumpled. Nurse Dubois—Sylvie, she insists I call her—remarked several times today that he is “easy on the eye,” which may be true, but I’m not going to give her the satisfaction of agreeing with her. Everything going on in Sylvie’s head ends up being said aloud, it seems. Somehow she managed to winkle out of Mr. Sinclair that he’d been a competitive swimmer and was good enough that he might have gone to the Olympic Games, had times been different. Surely he was still within earshot when Sylvie started twittering about his broad chest and how nice it will be to have a big, strong man around to help with any heavy lifting. As if we don’t have a selection of burly policemen at our beck and call every hour of every day! I blush just listening to her. Besides, Mr. Sinclair isn’t particularly tall.
May 9, 1937
DR. DAFOE ASKED me to stop by his office after lunch. He now has a little seating area with a large table and chairs, where he can meet with some of his many guests, as well as a second desk for Mr. Sinclair, situated just inside the door.
The doctor led me to the new table and offered me tea, summoned by the ring of a bell on the wall. Then he laid out my latest sketches and paintings for Mrs. Fangel, the ones I did last month. I had presumed they’d been sent off weeks ago.
“You’ve really done extraordinarily well with your art, Nurse Trimpany. I know little of these things, but people who do understand art tell me it’s unusual for someone to develop her talents so swiftly, with so little tutelage.”
He pulled out the two sketches and a small painting that I’d done of the girls playing with their umbrellas. The umbrellas were a gift from the Star newspaper, one in each of the girls’ colors, and Fred had taken a series of pictures with the girls holding them in the garden on a sunny day last month. émilie, my little monkey, was the funniest, peeping up at the sky and holding out her hand as if to feel for imaginary raindrops. Fred’s pictures wouldn’t have done them justice, of course, being in black and white. Same thing with the quick charcoal sketches I’d done at the time. But over the next few weeks, I’d played around with my watercolor paints and, in the end, painted what I think is one of my best works so far. The watercolors give the painting a true spring feel, and the colors are really the thing that everyone associates with the girls now that each has her own official color. Call it a tiny act of rebellion, but I mixed up the colors in my painting, matching green with Annette, cream with Yvonne, and so on. I suppose I wanted to show that each girl is more than a single color; as far as I’m concerned each is a rainbow unto herself. I expect no one else will notice. I knew Maud would like this one, but here it was in Dr. Dafoe’s office, presumably having never made it to New York.
“This is really lovely, really lovely,” Dr. Dafoe was murmuring, brushing his mustache with his index finger. “I thought of keeping it for myself, you know.”
So had I.
“But no, no,” he said, waggling his round head. “The other guardians and I, the minute we saw it, we knew it must be shared with the world.”
He eased himself into a chair across from me. “What would you think, Nurse Trimpany—Emma—what would you say if this picture was sold to an advertiser?”
He paused and waited. I opened my mouth and closed it, unsure of what to say. He chuckled at my reticence. “We didn’t send this work to Mrs. Fangel because we are of the belief that she could not improve on it, not at all. Instead, we have met with a company man and he has expressed an interest in buying this painting for an advertisement.”
I blinked at him for a minute, then managed to say: “An umbrella advertisement?”
Dr. Dafoe chuckled again. “No, no, Emma. A candy bar advertisement. Do you know Baby Ruth chocolate bars? This man was from the Curtiss Candy Company. They would like to use this for Baby Ruth.”
I have an entrenched habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.
“But the girls aren’t allowed to eat candy.”
A shadow crossed Dr. Dafoe’s face, I’m sure of it, but he answered kindly enough. “For now, yes, we cannot expose them to too much sugar. Dr. Blatz is in full agreement with me.”
He cleared his throat, then said, “But, Emma, we have discussed this before, how important it is that we build up the trust fund for the quintuplets with whatever opportunities come their way. Our poor girls”—here he gave a deep sigh—“people will always be interested in their lives, won’t they? They will always need to have sufficient funds to make sure they can live as publicly or as privately as they like.”