The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets Read online

  Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Miller

  Cover photograph collection of the author

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schwartz & Wade Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Schwartz & Wade Books and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published materials:

  Archives of Ontario: Excerpts from letter of July 3, 1935, by Fred Davis; diaries of 1934 and 1935 by Yvonne Leroux; handwritten draft entitled “Quintuplets” by Yvonne Leroux; and handwritten draft entitled “The Five Unluckiest Children” by Yvonne Leroux. Used by permission of the Archives of Ontario. All rights reserved.

  Berkley, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, and Carole Hébert: Excerpts from Family Secrets: The Dionne Quintuplets’ Autobiography by Jean-Yves Soucy with Annette, Cécile, and Yvonne Dionne, translated by Kathe Roth. Original title: Secrets de Famille, copyright © 1995 by Editions Libre Expression. English language translation copyright © 1996 by Stoddard Publishing. American edition copyright © 1996 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Carole Hébert and Berkley, an imprint of the Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

  Kathryn Brough: Excerpts from We Were Five: The Dionne Quintuplets’ Story from Birth Through Girlhood to Womanhood by James Brough (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), copyright © 1964 by James Brough. Used by permission of Kathryn Brough. All rights reserved.

  Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC: Excerpts from The Dionne Legend: Quintuplets in Captivity by Lillian Barker, copyright © 1951 by Lillian Barker. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781524713812 (trade) — ISBN 9781524713829 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524713836

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Part One: 1 in 57,000,000 Births

  Chapter 1: Quintuplets Born to Farm Wife

  Chapter 2: Canadian Woman Gives Birth to Five Girls; All Are Doing Well

  Chapter 3: Country Doctor Struggles to Save Lives of Canadian Mother and Quintuplet Girls

  Chapter 4: Progress of Quintuplets Amazes Medical World

  Chapter 5: Star Sends Assistance to Mother and Five Babes

  Chapter 6: Quintuplets May Go on Exhibit at Chicago Fair

  Chapter 7: Quintuplets’ Father to Get $100 a Week While All Live

  Chapter 8: Home Turned into Hospital

  Chapter 9: Parents of Quintuplets Dazed by Sudden Fame, Offers, Gifts

  Chapter 10: Too Many Showmen After Quintuplets

  Chapter 11: Dionnes Now Have to Guard Quintuplets from Tourist Horde

  Chapter 12: Quintuplet Hospital Started Near Home of Parents

  Chapter 13: Parents of Babies Plan for Future

  Chapter 14: Parents’ Wishes to Be Ignored

  Part Two: Quint-Mania

  Chapter 15: Ontario Adopts Five World-Famous Little Girls

  Chapter 16: Most Famous of Mothers One of the Unhappiest

  Chapter 17: The Private Life of the Dionne Quints

  Chapter 18: Quins Lose Stage Fright, 2500 Gawkers a Day

  Chapter 19: Quintuplet Frolics Play to “Standing Room Only”

  Chapter 20: The Threat to the Quints’ Happiness

  Chapter 21: Dionne Endorsements, Incorporated

  Chapter 22: Dr. Dafoe Himself

  Chapter 23: Science Designs a Life for the Dionnes

  Chapter 24: Home or Science? The Dionnes’ Case Debated

  Chapter 25: Just One Big Unhappy Family

  Chapter 26: Guardians of Dionnes Seek Better Relations with Tots’ Parents

  Chapter 27: “Felt Right at Home with King and Queen”

  Chapter 28: Dionne Suing Dafoe for Libel; New York Photo Basis of Action

  Chapter 29: Dionne Wins Control Over His Five Girls

  Part Three: Finding Home

  Chapter 30: Quints Will Soon Move to New Home

  Chapter 31: Dionne Quints Get Schoolmates, Nine Specially Selected Girls

  Chapter 32: Dionne Quints 16 Now, but No Dates, Says Stern Papa

  Chapter 33: Famous Dionne Quintuplets to Be Separated for First Time This Fall

  Chapter 34: Four Quints Dry-Eyed and Close to Shock

  Chapter 35: Four Dionne Sisters Start Life Anew

  Chapter 36: Boys? Million Dollars? Dionnes Shrug Shoulders

  Chapter 37: The Dionnes: A Fight for Happiness

  Chapter 38: Quints’ Story Causes New Wound

  Chapter 39: The Babies of Quintland Now: Broke and Bitter

  Epilogue: Dionne Visit Creates New Memories

  Photo Insert

  Afterword

  A Note on Dialogue

  References

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  TO SARAH NICOLE,

  who has a smile like Marie Dionne’s

  We don’t feel anyone can be fair to

  both sides and tell the truth.

  —THÉRÈSE DIONNE

  Children are the riches of the poor.

  —PROVERB

  In an empty nursery, behind two woven wire fences topped with barbed wire, five nine-year-old girls waited for their father. Five suitcases sat alongside them. Five smiling Shirley Temple dolls were clutched in their arms. Yvonne stared out the window at the yellow brick mansion up the hill. Annette quietly seethed, pretending not to be afraid. Cécile sat in a corner, rocking her doll. Émilie prayed that it was all just a bad dream. Marie tried to tell a silly story, but no one laughed.

  At the sound of their father’s footsteps in the hall, all five sisters hugged their Shirley Temples closer to their chests. The moment they dreaded had come.

  For the first time in their lives, the Dionne Quintuplets were going home.

  * * *

  —

  Oliva Dionne did not speak as he and his five identical daughters walked through the hospital’s guarded gate, down the road, and through another gate that led to the colossal Georgian house that was to be their new home. He did not lead them up the steps to the grand front door. Instead, he entered through a service door into the kitchen. Yvonne followed first, trying to be brave for her sisters’ sake. Though Yvonne was no more than a few minutes older than Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie, she had acted the part of the little mother since
she was a toddler.

  For nine years Mr. Dionne had battled with the government to unite his family under a single roof. Now that his triumphant moment had arrived, the man who had once crawled through a drainpipe to elude hospital guards just so he could glimpse his five famous babies through a window spoke a single sentence.

  “The little girls are here,” he told his wife, and continued into the house, leaving his daughters standing in the unfamiliar kitchen with their dolls and suitcases.

  “Bonsoir, Mom,” Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie said, greeting their mother in a mixture of French and English.

  “Supper will be ready soon,” Mrs. Dionne replied in French, then called for two of her elder daughters. “Show the little girls around the house,” she instructed.

  Without a word, “the little girls” followed as their big sisters pointed into one doorway after another. The living room, the den, the sewing room, their father’s office. Redolent of fresh paint and filled with pristine furniture, the house felt new and sterile, more sterile by far than the hospital that had been their home since they were four months old.

  Then they reached the dining room. Like everything else in the house, it was big, in this case big enough to seat fourteen—Mr. and Mrs. Dionne, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, Marie, and their seven brothers and sisters, Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, Daniel, Pauline, Oliva Jr., and Victor. An archway divided the room in half, with a table on each side. “This side is for our family,” the little girls remembered one of their elder sisters saying. “The other side is for your family.”

  Not one of the bewildered nine-year-olds knew what to say.

  The knock at the back door roused Douilda Legros from her bed. “Auntie, please hurry and dress and come over,” Oliva Dionne called. “Elzire, she is very sick. Please hurry,” he said again.

  Auntie Legros was on her way in minutes.

  It was only a short drive across the road to the Dionne farm, but it was long enough for Douilda Legros’s worries to unreel through her mind. Poor Elzire had never had such a difficult pregnancy. Headaches, dizzy spells, vomiting. Painful legs and feet swollen to twice their normal size. A finger pressed into her skin left a deep dent. Now and then the edges of her vision went black.

  Two, perhaps three weeks ago it had become so bad Elzire had finally consented to let her husband, Oliva, consult the doctor in spite of the cost. The doctor had ordered Elzire off her feet entirely, but that was next to impossible on a three-hundred-acre farm with five young children to care for.

  And now? The urgency in Oliva’s voice could only mean something worse yet. Perhaps the worst thing of all—the baby, coming too soon.

  Auntie Legros let herself in the front door without waking Ernest, Rose-Marie, Thérèse, and Daniel, asleep upstairs, and made her way to the bedroom at the back of the house. Eleven-month-old Pauline slept in a crib at the foot of the big wooden bed where Elzire lay. Her niece’s black eyes peered up out of a pale and puffy face. “Auntie,” she said weakly in French, “I don’t think that I will be able to pull through this time.”

  Auntie Legros could hardly contradict her. Even by the light of the kerosene lamp, it was clear that Elzire was ailing badly. The young mother’s legs and feet were so distended, her toes had nearly disappeared. She could neither stand nor walk. There was a bluish cast to her fingernails. Her labor pains had woken her sometime near midnight—mild at first, steadily advancing until there could be no doubt that the baby was insisting on being born.

  Nevertheless, Auntie Legros did her best to comfort her niece. “Don’t you worry, my dear. I will stand by you now as I always did before,” she promised. This child would be the fifth Dionne she had helped bring into the world.

  Elzire asked for her rosary, and the two women paused to say a prayer to the Blessed Virgin. Elzire kissed the feet of the crucifix and recited aloud the Ave Maria. Both women cried a little. Then Auntie Legros set to work.

  Herself a mother of nine, Douilda Legros had been helping deliver her neighbors’ children for eighteen years, sometimes assisting the midwife or doctor, sometimes working alone. In all that time, she’d lost only one baby—a premature infant, born with the umbilical cord around its neck. And now Elzire’s baby was coming two months too early.

  O God, inspire me in my work, Auntie Legros prayed.

  Nothing was prepared. No clothing, no diapers. Elzire should have had most of the summer to sew new baby things and accustom little Pauline to sleeping upstairs with her brothers and sisters. But that could not be helped now. Auntie Legros did what she could. She lit the wood stove and put a pan and a teakettle on to boil. She found a stack of newspapers to spread over the mattress, easing Elzire back and forth as she rearranged the bedding for the birth. Elzire was too weak to move without assistance, but the prayer, to Auntie Legros’s relief, had bolstered her niece’s spirits. Douilda Legros had never before seen Elzire discouraged or fearful, even during the most difficult of her deliveries, when Thérèse had been turned the wrong way.

  Just the same, Auntie Legros herself was growing more ill at ease as Elzire’s suffering increased. The prospect of losing another newborn was difficult enough; the memory of that failed premature delivery still haunted her. But to lose Elzire? Though they were not related by blood (Elzire was Douilda’s husband’s niece), Elzire had been like a daughter to her since she was a little girl. Auntie Legros had taken Elzire in after her mother’s long illness and death—until the eleven-year-old was compelled to leave school and return home to help her father care for a houseful of brothers. She had seen Elzire married to Oliva Dionne at sixteen, and watched her become the mother of six children before turning twenty-five. Hardest of all, she had supported Elzire when her fourth baby, two-month-old Leo, died of pneumonia.

  After all that, Auntie Legros would take no chances with Elzire’s health. Within an hour of her arrival at the Dionne house, she sent Oliva a mile down the road for Madame Lebel.

  To the French Canadians of Corbeil, Ontario, midwife and Madame Lebel were interchangeable terms. A large “weather-beaten” woman with “a heart as big as a washtub,” Madame Lebel had borne eighteen children of her own and delivered her neighbors of at least three hundred more, most of them without a doctor’s assistance. She never expected so much as a penny for her services—something that endeared her more and more each year to the small rural community, now that times were harder than anyone could remember.

  Madame Lebel recognized the gravity of the situation at once. Warmth and color were draining from Elzire’s body as the frequency of the pains increased. She ignored Elzire’s requests not to send for the doctor. “Elzire’s pulse is bad,” Madame Lebel told Oliva. “So is her general condition. Get Dr. Dafoe here quick as you can.”

  Oliva obeyed instantly.

  With her rosary pressed tightly to her heart, Elzire begged Madame Lebel to hurry the baby’s arrival. Though the Dionnes were one of the few families in Corbeil who were not receiving relief payments from the government, Elzire knew there wasn’t a cent to spare for the doctor. Since the Depression had hit, their savings had “melted away.” Not a day went by that she wasn’t thankful for Oliva’s $4-a-day job as a gravel hauler, but with a $3,000 mortgage on the farm and seven—soon to be eight—mouths to feed, $20 a week stretched barely far enough. Dr. Dafoe’s last visit had spread them tissue-thin; another might cost as much as a week’s wages. Elzire’s lips were white as she formed the request.

  * * *

  —

  Fewer than three miles separated Oliva Dionne from the doctor’s neat brick house in Callander, but it was dark, rocky going, more a rutted lumber trail than a road. Aside from the priest, not another man in the Corbeil parish had the good fortune to own an automobile, but it still might not get him there in time.

  When he reached the house with its plaque reading Dr. A. R. Dafoe, Oliva pounded on the door and r
ang the bell.

  Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe himself answered, wearing a pair of pants under his rumpled nightshirt. The doctor was an odd-looking man at any hour of the day—short enough that folks called him “the Little Doc,” with hands so small he had to buy gloves in the children’s department. Yet his head was so large he was rarely able to find a hat that fit properly. And he stuttered. The next day would be his fifty-first birthday.

  At first, the doctor could make little sense of Oliva Dionne’s presence on his doorstep. Elzire Dionne was not expected to deliver until late July. Besides, it was something like four o’clock in the morning, and Dafoe had had less than three hours’ sleep. Returning home from a delivery well after midnight, he’d sat up past one to read a detective story.

  “My wife is very sick,” Oliva said in English. (The doctor, like most who lived outside the tiny Catholic community of Corbeil, did not speak French.) “I think she soon have a baby. Can you come right away, Doctor?”

  “You go on back,” Dafoe told the worried father. “I’ll dress and come along in my own car.”

  Oliva had to know how long he would be.

  “A few minutes,” Dafoe answered, and shut the door.

  If the doctor was short with Oliva, it was not only because of the stutter that obliged him to get straight to the point. Dr. Dafoe had warned the Dionnes about Elzire’s condition, and they had not complied. She ought to have been in bed these last two weeks. No housework, no farm chores. Get a hired girl to take over Elzire’s work, Dafoe instructed Oliva, or else start looking for a new wife. Yet when the doctor visited the Dionne farm the next day, there was Elzire, waddling around the kitchen on feet puffed up like bread dough, aggravating the swelling as well as her blood pressure. The results of the test he’d conducted indicated the beginnings of toxemia—a condition better known today as preeclampsia, guaranteed back then to be fatal to mother and baby if it progressed—but Dr. Dafoe seems not to have bothered to explain all that to the Dionnes. He took it for granted that a doctor’s orders would be obeyed, regardless of whether his patient understood why.