فصل 05

5

Mollie Maggia poked her tongue gingerly into the gap where her tooth had once been. Ouch. The dentist had removed it for her a few weeks ago, after she’d gotten a toothache, but it was still incredibly sore. She gave herself a little shake and turned back to her dials.

The studio was very quiet, she reflected; so many girls had gone. Jennie Stocker and Irene Rudolph had been laid off, and Irene’s cousin Katherine had left for the second time. She and Edna Bolz both went to dial-paint for the Luminite Corporation, another radium firm based in Newark. Of the original girls, it was really only the Smith and Carlough sisters left now—and Mollie herself. Saddest of all, in her opinion, was that Ella Eckert had quit to go to Bamberger’s. It sure wasn’t the same place anymore, not since Roeder had taken over.

Mollie completed her tray of dials and stood to take it up to Miss Rooney. Despite herself, she found her tongue flicking back to that hole. The pain was just so nagging. If it didn’t get better soon, she thought, she was going to go to the dentist again—and a different one this time, someone who really knew what he was doing.

It didn’t get better soon.

And so, in October 1921, she made an appointment with a Dr. Joseph Knef, a dentist who’d been recommended to her as an expert on unusual mouth diseases. For Mollie, the appointment couldn’t come soon enough. For several weeks, the pain in her lower gum and jaw had become so intense that it was almost unbearable. As Knef ushered her into his office, she desperately hoped he would be able to help her. The other dentist had only seemed to make things worse.

Knef was a tall, middle-aged man with tortoiseshell glasses and an olive complexion. He gently probed Mollie’s gums and teeth, shaking his head as he examined the place where her tooth had been removed by the previous dentist. Although it had been over a month since it had been taken out, the socket had failed to heal. Knef observed her inflamed gums and softly touched her teeth, several of which seemed a little loose. He nodded briskly, certain he had found the cause of the trouble. “I treated her,” he later said, “for pyorrhea.”1 This was a very common inflammatory disease, affecting the tissues around the teeth; Mollie appeared to have all the symptoms. Knef was sure that, with his expert care, her condition would soon improve.

Yet it didn’t improve. “Instead of responding to the treatment,” Knef recalled, “the girl became steadily worse.”2

It was so terribly, terribly sore. Mollie had more teeth out, as Knef tried to stop the infection in its tracks by removing the source of her pain—but none of the extractions ever healed. Instead, ever-more agonizing ulcers sprouted in the holes left behind, hurting her even more than the teeth had.

Mollie struggled on, continuing to work at the studio, even though using her mouth on the brush was extremely uncomfortable. Marguerite Carlough, who was feeling completely well again, tried to engage her in chatter, but Mollie barely responded. It wasn’t just the pain of her gums, which seemed to take up all her concentration, but the bad breath that came with it. There was a disagreeable odor whenever she opened her mouth, and she was embarrassed by it.

At the end of November 1921, her sister Albina married James Larice. The wedding was held the day before Quinta’s daughter’s second birthday, and the bride found herself drinking in her niece’s funny antics with a newly maternal air. Soon, she thought, she and James would have their own little ones running about.

There was one cloud on the horizon though, darkening the newlyweds’ bliss: Mollie. Even though Albina now rarely saw her as the two lived distantly, all of Mollie’s sisters couldn’t help but be concerned by her deteriorating condition. For as the weeks passed, it wasn’t just her mouth that became sore; she started to have aches and pains in completely unconnected places. “My sister,” Quinta remembered, “began having trouble with her teeth and her jawbone and her hips and feet. We thought it rheumatism.”3 The doctor administered aspirin and sent her home to Highland Avenue.

At least she lived with an expert. One of the women she boarded with, fifty-year-old Edith Mead, was a trained nurse, and she cared for Mollie as best she could. But nothing in her training could make sense of this disease; she had never seen anything like it. Neither Knef, nor Mollie’s family doctor, nor Edith seemed able to make her better. Every appointment brought forth another expensive doctor’s bill, but no matter how much Mollie spent, there was no cure.

In fact, the more Knef tried to help—and he employed some “extreme methods of treatment”4—the worse Mollie became: the worse her teeth were, and the ulcers, and her gums. Sometimes, Knef didn’t even have to pull her teeth anymore; they fell out on their own. Nothing he did arrested the disintegration in the slightest degree.

And disintegration was the word for it. Mollie’s mouth was literally falling apart. She was in constant agony, and only superficial palliatives brought her any relief. For Mollie, a girl who had always loved to joke around, it was unbearable. Her smile, which had once been a toothy grin that beamed across her face, was unrecognizable as more and more of her teeth came out. Well, no matter; she was in too much pain to smile anyway.

As Christmas passed and the new year began, the doctors finally thought they had diagnosed her mysterious condition. Sores in the mouth…joint pain…extreme tiredness…a young single woman living outside the family home… Well, it was obvious, really. On January 24, 1922, her physicians tested her for syphilis, or Cupid’s disease—a sexually transmitted infection.

But the test came back negative. The doctors would have to think again.

By now Dr. Knef had noticed certain things about her case that made him doubt his initial diagnosis. It was, it appeared, an “extraordinary affliction”5; it was almost like something was attacking her from the inside, though he knew not what it could be. As well as the seemingly unstoppable disintegration of her mouth, to his trained nostrils the noticeable smell coming from her seemed “peculiar”6: “it differed decidedly from the odor commonly associated with the usual forms of necrosis of the jaw.”7 Necrosis meant bone decay. Mollie’s teeth—those that were left—were literally rotting in her mouth.

After conducting further research, Knef reached a conclusion. She was, he determined, suffering from a condition not unlike phosphorus poisoning. It was the same suggestion Katherine Schaub’s doctor had made, when she’d had her outbreak of teenage spots a few years before.

“Phossy jaw”—as the victims of phosphorus poisoning had grimly nicknamed the condition—had very similar symptoms to those that Mollie was enduring: tooth loss, gum inflammation, necrosis, and pain. And so, at her next appointment, Knef asked Mollie how she was employed.

“Painting numbers on watches so that they will shine at night,”8 she responded, wincing as her tongue formed the words and touched the ulcers in her mouth.

With that, his suspicions increased. Knef decided to take matters into his own hands. He visited the radium plant—but received little cooperation. “I asked the radium people for the formula of their compound,” he remembered, “but this was refused.”9 Undark was, after all, a highly lucrative commercial property; the company couldn’t share the top-secret formula with just anyone. Knef was, however, told that no phosphorus was used and assured that work in the factory could not have caused the disease.

His own tests seemed to back up the firm’s assertion. “I thought phosphorus might have been in the paint and caused her trouble,” he later said, “but all the tests I made failed to show it.”10 They were, it seemed, still in the dark.

None of this helped Mollie. By now, the pain was excruciating. Her mouth had become a mass of sores; she could barely speak at all, let alone eat. It was horrifying for her sisters to watch. She suffered such agony, said Quinta, that it “has unnerved me every time I recall [it].”11

Anyone who has ever endured an abscessed tooth may be able to imagine some small degree of her suffering. By now, Mollie’s entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth, and even the bones of her ears might be said to be one huge abscess. There was no way in the world that she could work in such a condition. She quit her job at the Orange studio, where she had spent so many happy hours painting dials, and was confined to her home. Surely, one day soon, the doctors would determine what was wrong, and cure her, and she could get on with her life again.

But no cure came. In May, Knef suggested that she come in again to his office, so that he could examine her and see what progress had been made. Mollie limped into his office; the rheumatism in her hips and feet had grown worse, and she was almost lame. But it was her mouth that took up all her thoughts, all her time, and consumed her. There was no escape from the agony.

She hobbled over to Dr. Knef’s dental chair and then leaned back. Gingerly she opened her mouth for him. He bent over her and prepared to probe inside.

There were barely any teeth left now, he saw; red-raw ulcers peppered the inside of her mouth instead. Mollie tried to indicate that her jaw was hurting especially, and Knef prodded delicately at the bone in her mouth.

To his horror and shock, even though his touch had been gentle, her jawbone broke against his fingers. He then removed it, “not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out.”12

A week or so later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.

Mollie couldn’t bear it—but there was no relief. All the doctors could offer were analgesic drugs that barely helped. Her whole face beneath her bouffant brown hair was just pain, pain, pain. She became anemic, weakening further. Knef, even though he wasn’t a physician (nor proficient at the procedure), tested her for syphilis again on June 20—and this time the results came back positive.

Mollie would probably have been devastated if she’d been told, but many doctors at that time kept diagnoses from their patients, and it is very likely Knef didn’t tell her, wanting her to concentrate on getting well. She would have known, had she heard the news, that it couldn’t possibly be that. But she had no idea what the real cause could be. If anything, she should be full of health—not only was she young, in her twenties, but she had worked with radium for years, for goodness’ sake. Only that February, the local paper had declared: “Radium may be eaten…it seems that in years to come we shall be able to buy radium tablets—and add years to our lives!”13

But, for Mollie, time it seemed was running out. After her jaw had gone, an important discovery was made. Knef had always hoped that by removing a tooth, or a piece of infected bone, the progress of the mysterious disease would be halted. But now it became evident that “whenever a portion of the affected bone was removed, instead of arresting the course of the necrosis, it speeded it up.”14 Over the summer, Mollie’s condition deteriorated even further. She was getting painfully sore throats now, though she knew not why. Her jaw, at times, would spontaneously bleed, and Edith would press white cotton bandages to her face, trying to stem the flow.

September 1922. In Newark, Mollie’s former colleague Edna Bolz was preparing to wed. Her husband-to-be was Louis Hussman, a plumber of German heritage with blue eyes and dark hair. He was “devoted”15 to her. She laid out her accoutrements with touching anticipation: the bridal gown, her stockings, her wedding shoes. Not long now.

Not long now. They are words of excitement. Expectation. And reassurance—to those in pain.

Not long now.

In September 1922, the peculiar infection that had plagued Mollie Maggia for less than a year spread to the tissues of her throat. The disease “slowly ate its way through her jugular vein.”16 On September 12, at five p.m., her mouth was flooded with blood as she hemorrhaged so fast that Edith could not staunch it. Her mouth, empty of teeth, empty of jawbone, empty of words, filled with blood, instead, until it spilled over her lips and down her stricken, shaken face. It was too much. She died, her sister Quinta said, a “painful and terrible death.”17

She was just twenty-four years old.

Her family knew not what to do with themselves; knew not what could have happened to take her from them so suddenly. “She died and the doctors said they didn’t just know from what,”18 remembered Albina.

The family tried to find out. Albina added, “My elder sister went down to Dr. Knef’s office; we were told after her death that she died of syphilis.”19

Syphilis. What a shameful, sad little secret.

The final medical bills came in, addressed to the girls’ father, Valerio, and labeled “for Amelia.”20 Her family doctor reduced, on request, the amount he charged them. But though it was a welcome gesture, it couldn’t bring Mollie back.

They buried her on Thursday, September 14, 1922, in Rosedale Cemetery, Orange, in a wooden coffin with a silver nameplate. It was inscribed simply “Amelia Maggia.”

Before they said their good-byes, her loved ones laid out her clothes: her white dress, her stockings, her black leather pumps. Gently, they clothed her body in the garments, and then Mollie was laid to rest.

Her family hoped that now, at last, she would find peace.