فصل 20

PART TWO

POWER 20

There was much to be done. Even before the summer was out, Dr. Martland had lent his voice to Katherine Wiley’s campaign to amend the industrial-compensation law. Yet the legal change was only part of it. For the girls, who now understood how unforgivably careless the company had been with their lives, the real question was how the firm’s executives could have considered them expendable. Why didn’t their basic humanity compel them to end the practice of lip-pointing?

Grace Fryer, for one, was filled with anger as her clever mind raked over what had happened. For she now recalled all too well a fleeting moment in her memory that sealed the company’s guilt.

“Do not do that,” Sabin von Sochocky had once said to her.1 “You will get sick.”

Seven years later…here she was in Newark City Hospital.

Now she realized: von Sochocky had known. He had known all along. But if he had, why had he let them slowly kill themselves with every dial they painted?

Grace had an opportunity to put that question to the man himself—immediately. For when Martland tested her and Quinta for radioactivity in July 1925, he wasn’t the only doctor present. Von Sochocky sat quietly beside the technical equipment as the girls were told that they were going to die. And as Grace listened to the words fall from Martland’s mouth—“all your trouble…presence of radioactive substances”2—the memory of that warning came rushing into her mind.

Still reeling from the news, Grace nonetheless jutted out her chin with archetypal resolve and looked levelly at her former boss.

“Why didn’t you tell us?”3 she asked simply.

Von Sochocky must have bowed his head. He stuttered out something about being “aware of these dangers”4 and said he had “warned other members of the corporation without avail.”5 Earlier that year he’d told Hoffman that he “endeavored to remedy the situation but was opposed by members of the corporation who had charge of the personnel.”6

He now said to Grace: “The matter was not in [my] jurisdiction but Mr. Roeder’s. Since the matter was under his supervision, [I] could do nothing.”7

Well, there was nothing the girls could do now about their fatal illness, that was for sure—and there was nothing von Sochocky could do about his. For he also blew into the machines that he and Martland had devised that summer; perhaps just out of interest, or perhaps with deep suspicion, for he had not been well. Von Sochocky’s breath, as it turned out, contained more radiation than anyone they had tested so far.

From the very start, Grace bore her diagnosis bravely. She had a courageous spirit and refused to let Martland’s prognosis affect her life. She had always loved her life and, if anything, she now valued it even more highly. So she tucked the diagnosis away in her mind and then carried on. She didn’t stop work; she didn’t change her habits: she kept swimming, she kept socializing with her friends, and she kept on going to the theater. “I don’t believe in giving up,”8 was what she said.

As for Quinta, like her friend Grace she was said to have borne the news with a “brave and smiling”9 demeanor. Far worse than her own diagnosis, in the mind of a kind-hearted woman like Quinta, was seeing her friends suffer. “She often worried,” remembered her sister-in-law Ethel Brelitz, “because the others were similarly afflicted.”10 At least she had the steadfast Dr. Knef to help her with her treatment; Quinta’s teeth grew worse over the summer and she relied on Knef’s attentions more and more.

Almost as soon as they’d received the news, Grace, Quinta, and Katherine Schaub hoped to bring a lawsuit against USRC in order to get some help with their crippling medical bills. Knowing that Marguerite Carlough had successfully done so earlier that year, they hoped that it would be straightforward. Isidor Kalitsch, Marguerite’s lawyer, was the obvious place to start their fight for justice; Quinta made the first appointment to see him. With some trepidation—for she had never done anything like this before—she limped into his office and outlined her case. He listened carefully, and then broke bad news: her action was barred by the statute of limitations.

The new girls had run into an old problem. The Workmen’s Compensation Bureau—where the company wanted the existing cases heard—had a five-month statute of limitations in New Jersey; Marguerite, who had filed suit about thirteen months after she’d left USRC, was thus going through the federal court, which had a more generous two-year statute. That was well matched for Marguerite, for she’d stayed with the company long after the other girls had left, so when she first became ill she was still an employee. But Quinta hadn’t worked for the firm since February 1919. She was now trying to start a lawsuit more than six years later: four years too late, according to the law, even though her symptoms hadn’t started until 1923 and she hadn’t received a diagnosis of radium poisoning until a few weeks ago.

But the law cared nothing for the fact that this brand-new disease took several years to manifest. The law was the law—and it said neither Quinta, nor Grace, nor Katherine had any recourse to justice; or, at least, that was the interpretation of Isidor Kalitsch. It fell to Quinta to tell the others what he’d said: “Nothing could be done.”11

It was galling news for them all. “When I realize,” said Grace Fryer, “that I am paying for something [that] someone else is to blame for…”12 Grace now tried another lawyer, Henry Gottfried, with whom she’d already had some dealings, but Gottfried told her that the case would take “considerable money to develop.”13 He said he could do nothing for her unless she gave him cash upfront. “[But] I had no money!” remembered Grace in frustration. “[For] I was compelled constantly to attend doctors. I felt very badly [yet] lawyers did not seem to be interested in the matter without a fee.”14

Part of the reluctance of attorneys to take the case was undoubtedly due to the power of the United States Radium Corporation. For not only were the legal issues potentially insurmountable, but the girls’ opponent in court would be a hugely wealthy, well-connected company, with government contacts and the financial resources to eke out the fight for as long as it took. Said Katherine Schaub: “Each of the other attorneys to whom I appealed felt that it was hopeless to try to collect damages from the radium company.”15

Another problem, too, was just how new the disease was; given the longevity of the radium-therapeutics industry, could it really be true that radium had hurt the girls? Perhaps, as Roeder had said, the girls were trying to “palm off something”16 on the firm.

Now the effects of the company’s suppression of the Drinker report really made themselves felt. Thanks to that concealment, published studies on the link between radium and the women’s illnesses had been available for only a matter of weeks. None of the lawyers had ever heard of radium poisoning. No one knew anything about it—no one, that is, except for Harrison Martland.

Martland was in direct contact with the girls over that summer, offering what assistance he could, and one day Katherine Schaub came to his lab to discuss something very important. She had always wanted to write—well, now she and Martland wrote something together, though its topic was macabre. In time, it would come to have its own name.

The List of the Doomed.

Martland wrote it out on the back of a blank autopsy report. He sketched out a series of penciled lines to create a neat chart and then picked up his fountain pen and wrote in flowing black ink, on Katherine’s direction:

1.Helen Quinlan

2.Miss Molly Magia [sic]

3.Miss Irene Rudolph

4.Mrs. Hazel Kuser

5.Mrs. Maillefer

6.Miss Marguerite Carlough…17

The list went on and on. Slowly, methodically, Katherine supplied him with as many names as she could recall: those girls she knew were ill or had died, as well as those who weren’t yet sick. She recalled some fifty former coworkers, whose names she gave to Martland.

In the years to come, the doctor was said to retrieve the list from his files whenever he heard of the death of a dial-painter. With chilling prescience, he would find her name on the list, written there back in the summer of 1925, and meticulously write a neat red D beside the woman’s name.

D is for Death.

Katherine was at that time in fair health. But as her formal diagnosis sank in, she found that she could not stop thinking about that prediction. D is for Death. She had already been made nervous by Irene’s passing; now, every ache became a symptom that could lead to her own sudden death. “I know I am going to die,” she said. She stressed it, trying it on for size: “Die. DIE. It doesn’t seem right.”18 When she looked in the mirror these days, it wasn’t the same Katherine who stared back at her anymore. “Her face, once usually pretty,” a newspaper wrote of her at this time, “is now pinched and drawn with suffering. The suspense and worry have undermined her spirit.”19

That was the thing. The worry. It put her “in a very precarious mental condition.”20 Her former company, keeping tabs on her, put it more harshly—they called her “mentally deranged.”21

“When you’re sick and can’t get around much,” Katherine herself said, “things are different. Your friends aren’t the same to you. They’re nice to you and all that, but you’re not one of them. I get so discouraged sometimes that I wish…well, I don’t wish pleasant things.”22

She became “very badly ill”23 and consulted a nerve specialist countless times. But Dr. Beling couldn’t stop her spiral of thoughts, nor halt that flickering cine-reel of ghost girls still playing in her head. Katherine had always been lively and sociable before, but now, her sister said, “She is not the same girl at all. She has completely changed in temperament.”24

Katherine’s periods stopped; she couldn’t eat; her features themselves seemed almost to change, with her eyes becoming larger and more bug-like, as though sticking out on stalks. That was what happened when you stared your own death in the face. She murmured: “Night and rainy days are the worst times.”25

Before the year was out, Katherine Schaub would be confined in a hospital for nervous disorders. It was little wonder, given the trauma she could see her friends enduring; the surprise was that more dial-painters weren’t similarly afflicted.

These days, visitors to Marguerite Carlough in St. Mary’s Hospital found her much the same. Her blood was almost white, and her blood count only 20 percent. (A normal reading would be 100 percent; this was only just compatible with life.) But it was her head, her face…her x-rays now showed that the radium had eaten away her lower jaw “to a mere stump.”26 Just as he’d experienced with Mollie Maggia, Knef found himself helpless to stop the rot.

Another patient at St. Mary’s that August of 1925 was Albina Maggia Larice—but for much happier reasons. Her stomach bloomed with pregnancy; her cheeks flushed with pride. For nearly four years, she and James had been trying for a child. Each month that had passed without the good news she yearned for had left a bitter taste in her mouth, as her body betrayed her time and again. Next month, she would tell herself…but then next month had always brought the same acidic disappointment.

Not anymore. At long last, Albina thought contentedly, rubbing a loving hand across her swollen belly, she was becoming a mother—she would cradle her child in her arms, tuck it into bed at night, keep it safe from harm…

When the pains had started, she’d made her way to St. Mary’s. Albina was clutching her stomach, trying to stop from crying out. It was strange but, somehow, even though she didn’t know how this was supposed to feel—somehow, in some way, something felt wrong. It just felt wrong.

The doctors put her in a room, laid her down on a bed. She pushed and pushed when they told her to. She felt the baby move through her, felt it as her baby came. Her son. She felt him, but Albina never heard him cry.

Her baby was born dead.