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In a sign of how seriously the company was taking the downturn in its operations, President Arthur Roeder himself took charge of the investigation. In March 1924, he approached Dr. Cecil K. Drinker, professor of physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, and asked him if he would conduct a study at the Orange plant. Drinker was a qualified MD as well as a recognized authority in occupational disease; Roeder was taking no chances but bringing in the very best. To Drinker, Roeder wrote: “We must determine definitely and finally if the material is [in] any way harmful.”1

To Roeder’s delight, Drinker found his letter “very interesting”2 and offered to meet him in April for further discussion. Roeder told him of two cases, one fatal—probably Irene Rudolph—and one “very much improved”3; Roeder emphasized knowingly of the latter: “I have been informed that her family have had considerable tubercular trouble.”4

In response, Drinker advised that “We are inclined to feel”—Drinker worked with his equally brilliant wife, Dr. Katherine Drinker, and another doctor called Dr. Castle—“that the two occurrences which you mention have been coincidences.”5

However, he added, “At the same time we are agreed that it is not at all safe to permit any conviction upon that point without a rather complete examination.”6 In April 1924, the study would begin.

It is not wholly clear who Roeder meant by his “very much improved” case. It was probably Marguerite Carlough, since she was the woman who had left his employ most recently (although, in fact, she was still greatly suffering), but it could also have been Grace Fryer, who was finally reaping the benefits of the expensive medical care she was paying for. Dr. Humphries was still examining her once a week to see how her strapped back and feet were doing; now, at last, he was happy to note she was improving.

Humphries, however, had care only of Grace’s body—and it was her jaw that was now becoming her major source of pain. The same month Roeder wrote to Drinker, Grace was admitted to hospital in New York for a weeklong stay; her latest round of x-rays showed a “chronic infectious process in the jaw,”7 and she sought treatment from Dr. Francis McCaffrey, a specialist, who operated on her, excising some of her jawbone. As Knef and Barry had found, however, once an operation had been carried out, another was needed, and then another after that. “I have been compelled to go to the hospital so often,” Grace later said, “that it seems like a second home.”8

Grace—as had so many of her former colleagues—now became trapped in a vicious circle, with each operation incurring yet another bill. Before too long, she had to swallow her pride and ask her parents for money; but the rising medical costs desecrated both her savings and the family’s bank account.

That spring, USRC, too, was concerned about money. April seemed rather distant for Drinker’s investigation to begin, given the pressing delay in production at the plant. Though Viedt had managed to hire an extra six girls, it wasn’t enough; the executives still had to address the “psychological and hysterical situation”9 that was now unfolding in the studio.

So, while it waited for Drinker to begin his study, the firm organized its own examinations of the current team of dial-painters, conducted by the Life Extension Institute. The girls were tested confidentially—but the reports were shared with the firm. “The individuals concerned,” Viedt wrote Roeder, “do not know that we have these copies…information given in them is very confidential and they might object to our having them.”10 Though the institute found some girls had infected teeth, it concluded that their ailments “did not reflect any specific occupational influence.”11 Roeder wrote contentedly to Viedt that the results were “just as I anticipated.”12

Viedt, however, who was more involved in operations at the studio, was not so reassured. “I do not feel quite as optimistic about this matter as you do,” he wrote to his boss. “While the Life Extension Institute have made a report, I do not believe that this will satisfy our various operators and that we must wait for Dr. Drinker’s final report in order to really convince them that there is no injurious element.”13

Roeder then added his own two cents. “We should create an atmosphere in the plant of competence,” he wrote decidedly to Viedt. “An atmosphere of confidence is just as contagious as one of alarm and doubt.”14 And he advised that, in his view, “the most important action is to see Barry and perhaps others who have been making statements [having] jumped at conclusions apparently without thought or knowledge.”15

Viedt knew an instruction when he heard one: in late March 1924, he duly paid a visit to Barry and Davidson.

The dentists received him coolly. They had no doubt that the agonizing condition they were seeing in their patients was due to the girls’ former employment at USRC. During Viedt’s visit, they became outraged by what they considered a cold-blooded attitude.

“You ought to close down the plant,” Davidson told Viedt angrily. “You’ve made $5 million. Why go on killing people for more money?”16

Viedt had no answer.

“If I could have my way,” Davidson told him bitterly, “I would close your plant.”17

The dentists weren’t the only ones whose interaction with the girls had brought them to the point of frustration. Lenore Young, the Orange health officer, having seen the Department of Labor do nothing with her recommendation that the Public Health Service be called in, now discreetly took matters into her own hands. On April 4, 1924, she wrote confidentially to Katherine Wiley, the executive secretary of the Consumers League, a national organization that fought for better working conditions for women. “The authorities are hesitating,” Young confided in Wiley. “[The Consumers League] must keep after them to see that something happens.”18

Wiley was a smart and enterprising woman, in charge of the New Jersey branch of the League. A somewhat plain, dark-haired lady in her early thirties, with features too small for her face, she was a tenacious and driven person. When Young asked for her help, Wiley responded immediately. She was assisted by John Roach from the Department of Labor who—unknown to his boss McBride—gave Wiley a list of the women affected, so she could conduct her own investigation.

It came not a moment too soon. For on April 15, 1924, another young woman lost her life. Jennie Stocker—who Dr. Humphries had been trying to treat for her peculiar knee condition, without avail—died suddenly after a short illness at the age of twenty.

The day after she died, Roeder kept his appointment with the Drinkers. He showed them around the plant, and then they went up to the studio and spoke to several of the women, including Marguerite Carlough. It is surprising that she was in the studio, and not simply because she no longer worked there; since Christmas Eve 1923 she had been confined to her home, except for her visits to Dr. Barry. It is possible that the company had asked her to come in specially to meet the Drinkers, being determined to lay to rest the rumors that Marguerite’s work had made her sick.

She was accompanied by her sister Sarah Maillefer, who now walked with a cane. Sarah was still working at the plant as a dial-painter; the Carlough family was poor, and with Marguerite no longer able to work and the medical bills mounting, they needed every penny they could get. Sarah’s trouble, of course, was very different from that of Marguerite. Evidently, her lame leg was not connected to the awful disease that was plaguing Marguerite’s mouth.

Dr. Cecil Drinker was a handsome man with abundant fair hair. He introduced himself to Marguerite with immediate concern for her well-being. Her thin face was very pale and she clutched a bandage to her seeping cheek; she complained of “pains in the bones of her face.”19 It was obvious that she was seriously ill.

Katherine Drinker turned to Roeder and told him that the day’s tour could not be considered an adequate survey. It was imperative, she said, that the Drinkers return to Orange to make a comprehensive study of the plant and its employees. And so, over two days, from May 7 to 8, 1924, the full Drinker study took place. The scientists, now fully read up on all the radium literature, returned to the plant with their colleague Dr. Castle and conducted a detailed investigation. Together, the three doctors inspected all the different facets of the operation, accompanied on their tour by Vice President Viedt.

They met the chief chemist, Dr. Edwin Leman, and noted that he had “serious lesions”20 on his hands. Yet, when they mentioned them, he “scoffed at the possibility of future damage.”21 Perhaps he was mindful of his president’s suggestion that an atmosphere of confidence should be promulgated by the plant’s top men.

Such an unconcerned attitude, the Drinkers soon realized, was “characteristic of those in authority throughout the plant.”22 “There seemed to be,” Cecil Drinker later wrote, “an utter lack of realization of the dangers inherent in the material which was being manufactured.”23 Roeder even told him that “no malignant growths ever developed on the basis of radium lesions; a statement so easy to disprove as to be ridiculous.”24

Up in the studio, the doctors carried out thorough medical examinations of the workers. Twenty-five employees were selected as a representative number; one by one, the nominated dial-painters knocked nervously on the door of the restroom, where the women’s tests were held, before being summoned in. Sarah Maillefer was one of those chosen. As the doctors requested, she opened her mouth wide so they could prod at her teeth; kept still as they probed firmly around her nose and throat; offered the vulnerable inside of her arm so they could take a vial of blood. The exam then transferred to the darkroom; here, Katherine Drinker “examined a number of these women, some quite intimately, to determine to what degree they were luminous when sufficiently in the dark.”25

Oh, that luminosity. That glow. Katherine Drinker was stunned by it. As the women undressed in the darkroom, she witnessed the dust lingering on their breasts, their undergarments, the inside of their thighs. It scattered everywhere, as intimate as a lover’s kiss, leaving its trace as it wound around the women’s limbs, across their cheeks, down the backs of their necks, and around their waists… Every inch of them was marked by it, by its feather-light dance that touched their soft and unseen skin. It was spectacular—and tenacious, once it had infiltrated the women’s clothing. The Drinkers noted that it “persisted in the skin”26 even after vigorous washing.

The Drinkers didn’t limit their study to the plant: they visited Dr. Barry and also met some of the dial-painters who were now exhibiting such similar symptoms, including Grace Fryer. Thanks to the attentions of the expert Dr. McCaffrey in New York, however, Grace was the exception to the rule; the Drinkers were pleased to note she had “recovered satisfactorily”27 from her illnesses.

The same could not be said for Marguerite Carlough. Finding no relief with Barry, she had started consulting Dr. Knef, who’d treated Mollie Maggia. Marguerite’s appearance—she who had once favored dramatic feathered hats and glossy fashion—was by now very bad. Yet the worst was not on the outside, despite her deathly pale skin and emaciated body, but on the inside, “from the [constant] discharge of foul pus in her mouth.”28 She was suffering excruciatingly.

Knef attended her as best he could. “At least once a day I’d go up there,”29 he remembered. It was a fifteen- to twenty-mile drive from his office to the Carlough home on Main Street, Orange, but on occasion he would attend her from two to six times a day. Sometimes, he recalled, “I have been with her as high as three days and three nights on a stretch.”30 Such close attention was well beyond the budget of the Carloughs, so Knef was essentially working for free. It was good of him, but it didn’t necessarily mean that Marguerite was receiving the best-qualified attention.

Yet Knef knew more than most about the disease, even if he didn’t, at that time, understand the full implications of his growing knowledge.

Dr. Knef was a medical man through and through. When Mollie Maggia’s jawbone had so shockingly broken against his fingers, he had been fascinated by it—so he had kept it, this oddly moth-eaten, misshapen piece of bone. Every now and again, after her death, he had examined it, turning it over in his hands, but he was none the wiser; anyway, she had died of syphilis, whatever the strangeness of her bones. He’d therefore popped the fragment into his desk drawer, where he kept his x-ray negatives, and eventually it slipped his mind.

And then, one day, his duties had required him to dig through that crowded desk drawer for the x-ray films. He had scrambled through the bits and pieces he kept in there, searching for them. To his astonishment, when he finally pulled them out, the films were no longer ebony black. Instead, they were “fogged,”31 as though something had been emanating onto them.

But there was nothing in that drawer but old files and forgotten scraps of bone.

He turned the x-ray film this way and that. The spoiling of the film was undeniable. It was a message, though little did Knef know it, but its meaning was unclear.

Mollie Maggia was still voiceless, even after all this time.