The Quintland Sisters(74)
Second of all: I think the work you are doing at the Dafoe Nursery is important, no question. There is so little hope and joy to spare, especially now. You have, in your care, five sweethearts who have brought the world so much happiness. If that’s not important, I don’t know what is.
I’ve been reading Le Droit in the hopes of improving my French. Yesterday the paper quoted a spokesperson for the Association of French Canadians of Ontario saying that, apart from Yvonne Leroux, not a single nurse has remained on staff at the Dafoe Nursery for more than 22 months (proof, he said, of the unhealthy environment in which the quintuplets are being reared). Based on this, I’d say this means your invisibility, at least in some quarters, remains intact! It is bold of me to say it, but your powers of invisibility have never worked especially well on me.
My feathered Howard and Bette send their best. They’ve been busy with a nest they built in a nook in the wall, but Howard still visits my sill to strut and coo-roo about his fine life.
Yours truly, Lewis
11 Rue Saint Ida
Montreal, Quebec
July 15, 1938
A letter from Lewis that I can’t get out of my mind. I’m flattered, I suppose, but also flustered. Perhaps I misunderstood the nature of this correspondence? I have no idea. I value his friendship highly, but I’m not quite sure where I stand or what he expects me to write in return.
July 28, 1938
MISS JULIE CALLAHAN is the girls’ new teacher, replacing Norah—Miss Rousselle—who leaves us tomorrow. The girls absolutely adore Miss Callahan. She is very pretty with a lovely figure and dark, curly hair, rosy cheeks, and soft brown eyes. To see her with one of the babies on her lap, you’d think she was their big sister or mother. Clever, too, I gather, with a double degree of some sort from Dalhousie University. Miss Callahan told me her mother is Acadian-French, but she married an Irishman—hence her last name. There’s no way the Dionnes could find fault with her French. She is as bilingual as I am, with not a trace of an accent in either tongue. She’ll fit in so nicely here, I think. Everyone has warmed to her straightaway.
August 5, 1938 (King Features Syndicate Inc.)
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DR. DAFOE’S COLUMN ON THE QUINTUPLETS AND THE CARE OF YOUR CHILDREN
By Allan Roy Dafoe, Personal Physician to the Dionne Quintuplets
We are always having fun with the stones around the nursery here in Callander, where the Quintuplets live. As I’m sure you all know by now, these stones are supposed to have some strange quality of fertility in them that brings children to any woman who carries one.
Every little while I get a letter from somewhere in the United States from some couple who visited us in the summer and took stones home with them. People who have been childless for years have written me that a baby was on the way shortly after they got the stones.
Well, I got one of these letters a couple of days ago that I thought rather amusing. A young couple came up here on their honeymoon a year ago.
He was a young engineer, from near New York City, and she was a particularly attractive young woman. I remember they came in to my office one afternoon and we sat and talked for quite a spell. Before he left, he showed me five little pebbles he had collected from the box out at the nursery. His wife blushed a bit as he showed them, but he thought it was a great joke. I hadn’t heard anything more of them until recently when he wrote me a letter. First thing he told me was that his wife had just given birth to twins.
But that wasn’t all. He explained that he had taken five stones away with him. When he got home, however, he didn’t keep them all. Three young couples he knew wanted children, so he gave them each a stone, keeping two for himself.
“Boy, I’m glad I didn’t keep the whole five stones,” his letter closed.
Always, when a motion picture company from Hollywood comes up here to make a picture, the actors and actresses have fun with our pebbles. They package them up and send them to fellow actors and actresses back home, who aren’t anxious to have children. I’ve never heard whether any of these particular stones bore fruit or not.
When the children grow older and learn about this legend of the stones, they will never be at a loss for a wedding present to send to an acquaintance getting married. The only trouble is that at the rate the stones are being carried away now, there may not be any left by that time.
? 1939 King Features Syndicate, Inc. Used with permission.
August 20, 1938
I’m back at the nursery after a wonderful day in Toronto with Ivy. She is so elegant and sophisticated now. It’s hard to picture her as she was the summer we met—her face as flushed as a fire ant in that hot kitchen when we had the babies tucked in their crate by the stove, or peeling off her stockings when she got fed up with the heat in late August, before the Captain went to the hospital and Yvonne almost died. I loved the time we spent cocooned together at the nursery, but, her metamorphosis complete, Ivy has flown the length and breadth of the continent dazzling everyone she meets while I’ve stayed curled in my cozy shell. Today she was hell-bent on convincing me it was time to grow wings of my own.
“You could go anywhere! There are many, many households these days who can afford to have a nurse or a governess on staff, and they would leap at the chance to hire a nurse of the Dionne quintuplets.”