The Quintland Sisters(7)
I myself have no intention of marrying. Boys have never shown much of an interest in me—my horrible birthmark—so I’ve never imagined my future might include a husband and children, a white clapboard house plunked alongside a stretch of pasture, cows that need milking, chickens to be plucked. That’s why Mother worries. And it’s no doubt why she spoke with Marie-Jeanne Lebel about taking me on as an apprentice. But I didn’t say that to Ivy.
“What does your father do?” she asked.
“He’s the Callander postmaster now. He worked for many years as a classics professor at Carleton University, which is where he met my mother. She’s French, from Hull. Father lost his position at the university a few years ago and, through some family connections, managed to secure the position in Callander when the post office was rebuilt after the fire of ’thirty-two.”
Ivy nodded. I can imagine what she was thinking. A government job is a rarity in these hard times. She would know that we’re getting along better than most.
“No brothers or sisters?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I think they made a point of being careful after they had me,” I said, pointing at my cheek. I’ve never said anything like that before, but Ivy had made a point of commenting on my birthmark. She had held my face in her hand.
“Nonsense,” she said, then set me the task of bleaching and boiling all the cotton diapers Dr. Dafoe had brought that morning.
I didn’t hear anyone coming up the porch steps, so I started at the sound of a loud rap at the door.
Ivy pulled it ajar, the back of her hand already abutted against her hip so as to give these latest lookie-loos a piece of her tongue for barging all the way up onto the porch. But they weren’t locals—they were two city men who’d arrived in a fancy car. They were carrying big cameras on stilts and said they’d driven all the way from Sault Sainte Marie and Montreal to film the babies for the newsreels.
Ivy was firm. “M. Dionne is not presently at home,” she said.
The men started in with a long list of protests and explanations, and one slid his toe past the doorjamb. Ivy lifted a finger to her lips and crunched her eyebrows together at them, nudging the man’s polished leather shoe back over the threshold with a tap of her own foot.
“Shhhhh!” she hushed. “You will wake Mme. Dionne, and you’ll rouse the babies. They are very, very frail.”
The men retreated to the yard, and we watched them through the window to see what they’d do. They leaned on the hood of their four-seater and struck up conversations with the steady stream of curious folks stopping by. After a few minutes, Dr. Dafoe pulled up in his sleek green car, and both men got busy behind their big cameras and started asking him questions.
Ivy had drawn the muslin over the kitchen window to keep people from peering in, but she’d cracked the sash in the hope of getting a bit of a breeze. Now she stood with her ear to the gap to hear what Dr. Dafoe was saying.
No need, as it turned out. Seconds later the door was swinging open again, and Dr. Dafoe was leading the men into the kitchen.
“Of course, of course,” he was saying. “A true miracle of creation, all identical. They are unlikely to all be alive tomorrow, so it’s important to have a record.”
If that was all true, it was a bold move waltzing in with the motion picture men without checking first with Ivy. What if one of the babies had died while Dr. Dafoe was out? What if the newsreels showed just four babies or three?
Ivy was angry, I could tell, but she waited for the men to set up their cameras, then lifted the blankets off the box.
Just then, M. Dionne burst through the front door and all hell broke loose.
“Get out, get out!” he started screaming in English, then in French for good measure. One of the cameramen swung his huge contraption around and tried to film M. Dionne grabbing his colleague by the collar of his shirt. I thought M. Dionne was going to kick the camera right over.
Dr. Dafoe cleared his throat and urged all three men back outside with a sweep of his arm, shutting the door behind him. I could hear him attempting to say something to one of the newsreel men, but they were busy trying to film M. Dionne, who had shouted a stream of obscenities and dashed back into his truck, saying he was going for the police. He spun out onto the road in a cloud of dust, and the cameramen, incredibly, hopped in their big car and started after him, one of the men trying to maneuver his big camera out the passenger-side window!
Dr. Dafoe stood on the porch watching, taking out a little bag of tobacco, packing his pipe, then lighting it. The kerfuffle had woken the babies, first the little ones, then the bigger ones, which is a funny way to describe them when they are all so small. Their cries were so soft, like robin chicks piping for their mother to return with a worm. Dr. Dafoe must have heard it all the same, because after a few puffs he tapped the bowl on the rail, pocketed his pipe, and came back indoors.
I lasted until just after two or three in the afternoon, when the Red Cross nurse, Marie Clouthier, returned, bringing with her another nurse and an orderly, both English, plus two ounces of breast milk that Sister Felicitas had managed to drum up at St. Joseph’s Hospital. There was not enough to go around, so Dr. Dafoe insisted it be given to the three smallest. By then the priest had returned with M. Dionne and they were praying with Mme. Dionne in the next room, deciding on names for the babies.
At one point M. Dionne drifted into the kitchen and told Ivy he’d be happy to run her home in his truck if she needed some rest. She demurred, saying she wasn’t feeling tired, which couldn’t have been true. She’d been on her feet most of the night. I’d been at the Dionne farmhouse nearly twenty-four hours longer than Ivy, of course, and I was exhausted. But I didn’t say so, and M. Dionne did not turn my way to repeat his offer. I certainly wasn’t looking to go anywhere with M. Dionne. He was a different man now than he’d seemed the night he and Marie-Jeanne had picked me up after midnight. Less than two days ago, I realized. It seemed a lifetime. He appeared calmer now that his wife showed signs of recovery, gliding quietly through the house, fixing Dr. Dafoe and the nurses with long, glowering looks and muttering in French under his breath.