فصل 49

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فصل 49

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49

Work began on the case immediately. That same day, straight after the hearing, Grossman and the women met for a conference so he could gather more information. Then he packed up his big brown leather briefcase, swiveled in his spats, and headed on back to Chicago.

Assisting him in his preparations were his loyal secretary Carol Reiser and his German wife, Trudel. Much of the historical radium literature was in German, so Trudel spent hours translating documents as Grossman got up to speed on the intricacies of the case. He regularly turned in eighteen-hour days, and his team worked hard to keep up.

Since Al Purcell now lived in Chicago, he nipped over to Grossman’s office to see if the women needed to do anything. “For God’s sake,” Grossman had declared, “get a doctor’s statement!”1

They followed his directions, but securing their medical records turned out to be difficult. “I have written my doctors,” reported Catherine later that year, “and no reply came back.”2 Pearl Payne also found that the hospitals where she’d been treated refused to release her records. She ended up begging her doctors: “Please help me get these records. This case is up for final hearing.”3

The women were not the only ones requesting records. That fall, Grossman served notice on Radium Dial to “produce [the results of] all physical examinations of employees.”4 The company had concealed the true test results: Grossman wanted to know how much the firm had known, and when.

The women were delighted by his diligence. “At a great sacrifice,” Pearl Payne wrote to commend him, “you have continued daily to lay other engagements aside to formulate the great mass of information necessary to properly present these cases.”5

Grossman decided that the lead litigant would be Catherine Donohue; followed by Charlotte Purcell, whom Grossman described as “my next best case.”6 Catherine didn’t necessarily have the most evidence behind her, nor was she the most compelling personality to take the stand. It wasn’t even that she had the most fire in her belly for the fight. It was simply believed that she was the woman who would be next to die. “She hasn’t long to live,” Pearl said quietly of the decision. “We want her to have her day in court.”7

Although Catherine was no more an extrovert than her husband, she nevertheless seemed accepting of the responsibility. “The strength for the women in my family,” said one of her relatives, “has always been to do the right thing and stand up for what you believe in. [Catherine] saw a huge wrong and [she wasn’t] going to be quiet about it.”8

While Grossman beavered away in Chicago, it seemed a long and lonely fall to Catherine Donohue. Her condition continued to deteriorate, more and more rapidly. “My hip is very bad, Pearl,” Catherine admitted to her friend. “It is all I can do to get around at all.”9 That hard lump on her hip was growing undeniably bigger. She took x-ray treatments for it but later said, “Well, I took thirty of them and it sure failed to give me any relief.”10 Her physicians seemed unable to stop her decline, but Catherine refused to give up hope. There’d been some coverage a while back about a treatment that might eliminate radium in victims’ bones—she just needed to hang in there, and a cure would come.

With Catherine unable to manage the stairs anymore due to her misshapen hip, Tom brought her wrought-iron bed downstairs to the front room; he slept on a couch at the foot of it. He made it as comfortable as he could for Catherine; there was a makeshift lamp at the head of the bed, as well as a radio, and he hung a very large wooden crucifix on the wall above the bed. It had Jesus on it, so He could look over and look after Catherine as she slept. Her crutches were set against the wall, ready for when she was assisted to the bathroom; a “well-worn pair of slippers”11 rested by their feet. The “timid-looking bunny rabbit”12 given to the children last Easter kept her company on the bedside table.

The room had two windows in the front and a window to the west. “It had good light,” recalled her niece Mary, “but they kept the shades drawn; I suppose that was what she wanted.”13 It made for a rather dim setting—but then Catherine had a light of her own.

“Even now,” she said numbly, “my body gives off a faint luminous glow when surrounded by darkness.”14

“You could see every bone in her body,” remembered her nephew James. “She was just lying on the bed.”15

When the girls had used to play their games in the darkroom at work, they themselves had used to vanish, eclipsed by the glowing element, so that all you could see was the radium. That eclipsing effect now seemed strangely prophetic, for when people looked at Catherine these days, they didn’t see her; they saw only the effects of the grim poisoning that had taken over her body.

“People are afraid to talk to me now,” Catherine confessed. “Sometimes it makes me terribly lonesome—they act as though I’m already a corpse. It’s hard to have people around and still to be alone.”16

Even when the family came to visit—the Donohues had always hosted meals after church on Sunday, when they’d serve eggs and bacon and Catherine would pour tea from her white china teapot printed with pink rosebuds—James remembered that they talked in the other room so Catherine could rest. Someone else now poured the tea.

As the year drew toward its end, Catherine’s isolation became even more intense. She now spent “nearly all of her days and nights lying down, venturing outside only with help, generally that of her husband.”17 “He used to carry her around in his arms,”18 recalled James.

In such a condition, there was no way she could mother her children as she wanted or needed to. Although the Donohues had no money, a housekeeper was arranged; this live-in nanny, Eleanor Taylor, now became a surrogate mother to Tommy and Mary Jane. Catherine tried to direct her children’s care from bed.

“I think it made her feel so sad that she couldn’t take care of her baby girl,” commented her niece Mary. “She had been able to somewhat take care of the boy, and so he got to really have a mother’s love. It was just a very sad situation, it really was.”19

It wasn’t even simply Catherine’s health that now kept her from the kids. Mary Jane was still very small, and her mother worried desperately that the glow she gave off in the dark was harming her baby. “They were almost afraid,” remembered Mary, “to have Mary Jane interact with her mother. They really didn’t quite understand the radium sickness [and what it might do]. That was the sad part.”20

“I suffer so much pain,” Catherine wrote to Pearl, and she may not simply have meant her aching hip and jaw, “that at times I feel my life was pretty hard to bear.”21

Stuck on her own in bed all day, Catherine was incredibly lonely. Charlotte now lived in Chicago; Pearl lived miles away in LaSalle. Though the girls wrote to each other, it wasn’t the same. Catherine exclaimed in a letter to Pearl that December: “I have so much to say, one cannot give it all on paper.”22 Her loneliness leaped off the page: “It has indeed been a long time since I have heard or seen any of you girls that it seems like writing to a stranger. I only wished we lived nearer one another.”23 Still, at least she could be honest with them: “As to my health,” she wrote bluntly, “I am still a cripple.”24

Her isolation meant she had no idea what was happening in the court case. “We have not heard from Grossman ourselves and I can’t understand,” Catherine wrote to Pearl. “Tom is not working now or I would call him long-distance and find out if he is coming down. Seems funny he has not written, doesn’t it?”25 But Grossman had been too busy to write. “This is the first of the Radium Dial cases,” he later said, “and I can leave no stone unturned in reaching for all the light and truth and all the facts of record.”26 He did, however, drop the girls a festive card “with every good wish for a Happy Holiday Season.”27

And Catherine took his advice to make that Christmas a happy one. Though Tom was still unemployed, she wrote in upbeat words to Pearl: “It makes it bad around Christmas, but one mustn’t complain.”28 When Father Griffin visited to give her Holy Communion, Catherine sent a little prayer up to God to give thanks for all her blessings. She and Tom and Tommy and Mary Jane might be poor, and Catherine might be sick, but they were together at Christmas, and that was something for which she was simply very, very grateful.

The new year, 1938, was all about preparing for the trial. The court date was set for February 10, six days after Catherine’s thirty-fifth birthday. Grossman was as busy as ever, and now spending more time in Ottawa as he prepared the women for their testimonies. Since it was wintertime and Illinois weather could be fierce, on occasion he had to pull out all the stops to make it there. “They went back and forth,” recalled his son Len. “I know one time the roads were bad so he rented a private plane and somebody flew him down there [in] a two-seater or four-seater plane.”29 It was a typically flamboyant Grossman gesture.

The day after Catherine’s birthday, she and Tom struggled to make what was now an extremely laborious journey to Chicago for examinations by three physicians: Dr. Loffler, Dr. Dalitsch (a specialist dentist), and Dr. Weiner; the latter took x-rays of her radium-filled bones. This trio of doctors had agreed to testify in court, and they would base their testimony on the exams.

They were shocked as Catherine staggered into their offices that Saturday morning. She was, Sidney Weiner recalled, “a woman appearing much older than her given age and walking with the assistance of two people; markedly emaciated; with an ash color [face].”30 She had no fat on her body at all. Unable to eat—for it was too painful to do so—the weight simply fell off her frame and left her skeletal beneath her loose dresses. Catherine knew she had lost weight. But even she was shocked when she stepped on the doctor’s scales; she weighed seventy-one pounds.

From his dental examination, Dalitsch found the “destruction”31 of Catherine’s mouth went “right through the body of the lower jawbones.”32 These fractures had led to “displacement of the fragments”33—which was why Catherine kept having to pick out pieces of her jawbone from her mouth. There was also, Dalitsch noted, “considerable discharge of pus and foul odor.”34

Loffler, meanwhile, ran tests on her blood, finding “an alarming loss of blood powers.”35 He discovered that she had a white blood cell count of only a few hundred, whereas normal levels are about 8,000. She is, he thought to himself, “near death from exhaustion caused by the lack of these [cells].”36

Yet it was her x-rays that troubled the doctors most. The hard tumor on her hipbone, which had so been concerning Catherine over the past few months, was now “about the size of a grapefruit.”37

The doctors didn’t share their findings with the Donohues. Catherine was a sick woman; she needed to get home to bed. Just as Irene La Porte’s doctor had felt, the physicians did not believe it was right to share their prognosis with Catherine, for fear of accelerating her decline. Far better that she stayed hopeful and positive: that, the doctors believed, would help her fight this disease far more than knowing the facts.

Catherine and Tom made the difficult journey back to East Superior Street. Tom carried his wife into the front room and laid her gently down on the bed. She needed to rest. For in five days’ time, she would have her day in court. Catherine Wolfe Donohue was holding Radium Dial to account for what it had done to her and her friends—and she was determined, no matter what, to make a difference.

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