The Quintland Sisters(64)
Then, as I watched, Dr. Dafoe’s head dipped and he slowly lifted his stocking foot, toes pointing skyward as if in accusation. My heart leapt into my throat, and this time I had to slap my hand over my mouth.
I couldn’t see his face, but heard his words clearly, his voice reedy and broken.
“A turd,” he croaked. “A turd in my nursery!” He lowered his heel gingerly to the floor. “You shame my girls, you threaten them with God’s wrath, yet feces lies unheeded on the floor of my nursery!”
I backed out of the room and made it to my dormitory before the laughter burst out of me as if from a pierced balloon. I buried my face in my pillow, my breath coming in gasps, until I thought I could safely make my way back to the playroom.
And now she’s gone too. Nurse No?l is gone.
February 18, 1938
FORGET ABOUT GERMANY: the real battle lines are shaping up here at the nursery. Scarcely ten minutes after Dr. Dafoe’s arrival this morning, M. Dionne was storming through the front door in shiny new shoes accompanied by M. St. Jacques, his solicitor. Dr. Dafoe had driven his own car again, the sun shining for the first time in weeks, bright and winking over the white drifts.
M. Dionne didn’t even pause to look in on the girls when he clattered past, his lawyer trailing behind him like a plume of exhaust. Dr. Dafoe ushered them into his office and closed the door.
Now an emergency meeting has been called, and all of the guardians will attend, including Judge Valin and the government man from Toronto.
February 28, 1938
TODAY’S MEETING BETWEEN the guardians started at noon and went all through the rest of the day and into the evening, and is still dragging on now. At 11:00 P.M.! George is locked in there with them this time. I shall have to persuade him to tell me what transpired.
March 1, 1938
NO SIGN OF Dr. Dafoe or the other guardians when I went down this morning. Dr. Dafoe’s office was locked, and even George was gone. No one returned to the nursery all day. A rare quiet day for me and the girls and Nurse Ulrichson.
I used the time to crack the spine on Collected Studies on the Dionne Quintuplets by W. E. Blatz. I hate it. Worse: I hate the part I’ve played in its creation. The pictures alone are enough to turn your stomach—page after page of the girls being stretched out and sized, measured, weighed, and calipered, their soft eyes meeting the camera’s lens with such a wretched mix of dread and resignation. Dr. Blatz and the other scientists write of them the way you might a troop of monkeys—indeed, two of the scientists we’ve had in our midst were not “child psychologists,” which is what we were led to believe, but zoologists. For the first time in history five children are growing up in a restricted social atmosphere of multiple contemporary siblings. The words make me sick to my stomach. I leafed through the rest of the book and learned nothing, not one thing about who these girls truly are and what makes them so special. I refuse to read another word.
March 2, 1938
WE HAVEN’T SEEN Dr. Dafoe since the meeting, but George is back and he’s being extraordinarily tight-lipped. He didn’t make his usual visit to the girls to gather inspiration for his column, and we didn’t see him at lunch. I slipped away again during the 3:00 P.M. free play and popped my head into the kitchen to ask Marguerite to put together a tray of tea and biscuits. She offered to bring it by, of course, but I took it to Dr. Dafoe’s office myself.
“Come in,” George said, and when I entered with the tea he smiled ruefully. He had his jacket off and his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, his hair tousled like a schoolboy’s.
“I know what you’re up to, Nurse Trimpany.” Then he sighed and pointed me to the other chair.
“Is everything okay?” I asked. “What happened?”
George made as if to settle back behind his desk again, then walked to the door and closed it softly. We’d never been alone in the office together with the door closed. I felt my birthmark begin to pulse. George, however, started pacing from one end of the room to the other, his arms clasped across his broad chest so that his shirtsleeves strained over the muscles bulging above his elbows. I busied myself with the teacups.
“Dionne has a long list of grievances,” he said finally. “He’s incensed about the dismissal of the two French staff, No?l and Tremblay. He’s furious about Dr. Blatz and his research, he’s angry about the Hollywood movies and the English lessons, he’s worried about ‘Protestant influences’ and the lack of French Catholic values. He’s suspicious of the endorsement deals and believes he’s not getting his fair share. It goes on and on. Frankly, I missed some of it because he occasionally switched to French and spoke so quickly I couldn’t make head or tail out of it.”
I took a seat, but didn’t say anything, I just watched George striding back and forth, his chin tucked, his cheeks flushed beneath the shadow of a beard. Then he stopped abruptly in front of my chair, inches from my knees.
“The big one,” he said, looking down at me. “He wants Dr. Dafoe removed as guardian.”
Removed? It made no sense. A heat had flared in me when he planted himself so close his trousers seemed to be brushing my skirt. Now a chill had chased away the warmth.
“But the girls wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for Dr. Dafoe.” I’d spoken with a quaver, which irked me. I tried to steady my words. “He’s the one who saved them and he’s the one who’s managed to keep them safe all along, through all of this.” I gestured around the office at the filing cabinets and papers, the framed photos and paintings of the girls with Palmolive soap, Life Savers, and cod-liver oil. The same brands, no doubt, that the Dionnes were selling at the souvenir shop across the street. “Without Dr. Dafoe’s protection, who knows what harms could have come to them,” I added. Even as I said it my thoughts strayed to Dr. Blatz and his awful book, and my voice faltered so that my last words were almost a whisper. “They belong every bit as much to Dr. Dafoe and this hospital as they do to anyone else, in any place.”