The Quintland Sisters(54)
August 18, 1937 (Toronto Star)
* * *
QUINTS CONTINUE DAILY “SHOWINGS”: EVERY SAFEGUARD TAKEN AGAINST PARALYSIS INFECTION
CALLANDER, Ontario—All traces of the “mild upper respiratory infections”—sore throats—which bothered the Dionne quintuplets, individually and collectively, have vanished, word from the Dafoe nursery advised today.
Precautions to guard them against the possibility of infantile paralysis, now prevalent in southern Ontario, have been ordered by Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe.
All visitors have been barred from the nursery, even tradesmen and others who have habitually entered.
Dr. Dafoe said he could not permit even the parents or the six other Dionne children to visit their sisters.
The quintuplets will, however, continue their twice-daily “personal appearances” for the benefit of tourists who’ve come from far and wide to glimpse the famous five and always leave with a lucky pebble in their pockets.
Used with permission.
August 23, 1937
A nasty altercation with M. Dionne, who came by yesterday with Maman in tow. I hightailed it upstairs to watch from the window. M. Dionne marched right up to the front door and insisted to Miss Beaulieu that plenty of time had passed for the girls to recover from their illness and it was time they saw their family. Dr. Dafoe had already left for the day, but Dr. Blatz is here visiting from Toronto, and he very officiously told the Dionnes that the girls are still ill and susceptible to further illness.
This can’t be true, can it? The girls seem fit as fiddles.
But Dr. Blatz stood his ground and sent Miss Beaulieu to summon one of the guards to escort the parents from the property. M. Dionne let fly then with a string of words that I won’t record here—indeed, I hardly know how to spell them—blaring that Dr. Dafoe would be hearing from his solicitor. His wrath seems to roll over Mme. Dionne as if she doesn’t hear it, or has heard it all before. She’d been hunched behind him on the stoop, her stout frame taking up most of the step and swathed in a pretty flower-print dress, swaying slowly with her head bowed. As the quarrel grew more heated, she drifted back down the steps and over to the tall fence, hooking her fingers through the chain-link and pressing her face close, even though there was no one in the yard and nothing there to see.
August 25, 1937
LEWIS WAS WAITING in the truck by the back door by the time I’d finished breakfast and brought me home to spend a day with Mother, Father, and little Edith. Quintland is swarming with visitors from sunup to sundown, but weekends are especially bad.
The worst is the scrutiny we face passing through the outer gates, people snapping photos and craning to see who is being ferried out of the inner sanctum of the nursery. Lewis typically keeps calm and collected, neither frowning nor smiling, and not distracted in any way by the people who wave or, worse, tap on the sides of the truck. Today before we pulled out, he said, “If I can make a suggestion, miss,” then gestured toward my hat, reaching as if to touch it. Then he hesitated, blushed deeply, and retracted his hand.
“It’s Miss Beaulieu who put me in mind of it,” he managed to say, his eyes dipping. “I’ve never taken her to or from the station without her pulling her hat down and sideways, just so.” He mimed a motion in the air, and I reached up to touch the wide brim of my hat.
“It may not be the fashion, Miss Trimpany, but Miss Beaulieu, she pulls her hat so far to the side and down over her face, I don’t think she can see anything until she knows we are out of the traffic again.”
I laughed then, because he was plainly amused to be giving me advice as to how I should be wearing my hat, but I rewarded him by unpinning it and angling it so that it was almost completely covering my birthmark, leaving my entire right face exposed to the passenger-side window.
“Like this?” I said.
He cleared his throat. “I meant the other side, miss.” I knew what he had intended, of course, and when his face reddened even further, I regretted my little joke.
“I’m sorry, Lewis, I’m teasing and I shouldn’t,” I said and, surprising myself, gave his arm a light tap where it rested on the wheel. I reached up and swiveled everything around again so that my hat was tilted rakishly toward the side window, my whole horribly blotchy left side perfectly exposed for Lewis and in shadow for anyone else.
Poor Lewis, he didn’t say another word for most of the rest of the journey, even after I repositioned my brim when the cars and pedestrians thinned out again. I may be mistaken, but I think I saw a flicker of a smile when I did so. Perhaps I didn’t hurt his feelings after all.
It’s nice not to be so miserably self-conscious around someone. Afterward I kept thinking: I tapped his arm. I teased him. Some days I don’t recognize myself.
August 29, 1937 (New York Times)
* * *
THE QUINTUPLET PROBLEM
(Editorial) If human mothers were in the habit of giving birth to sets of five babies at once, the lives of the Dionne sisters would doubtless have been uneventful. They are distinctive, and indeed unique, not because of any peculiarities they possess but because of the mere accident of their birth.
We may assume that the little Dionnes take it for granted that one is visited from one’s earliest infancy by thousands of pilgrims, who gaze at one through the protective glass and are spellbound by one’s most casual antic. That, for the Dionnes, is as much a part of life as eating, sleeping and playing. Some years hence they will learn and understand the reason. But by that time what will a quintuplet’s eye-view of the world be like? Will they be disposed to lament the day that made them five instead of one or two? Will they be harassed, as royalty must be, by having to live up to a fame they have not earned? Will they be shocked and appalled when they realize that as long as they live they cannot escape notice—that, indeed, the longer they all live, the more remarkable they will seem?