فصل 50

کتاب: دختران رادیوم / فصل 51

فصل 50

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50

Thursday, February 10, 1938, dawned as a cool and cloudy day. In the front room of East Superior Street, Tom Donohue helped his wife to dress. He helped her slide on her knee-high nude stockings, lace her flat black shoes. Catherine had picked out her best outfit: once again the black dress with white polka dots slipped over her head, and she slowly fastened its black belt around her emaciated waist. The dress hung so much more loosely than it had in July when she’d first met Grossman, but she wasn’t going to think about that today.

As a final addition, around her left wrist she looped a silver-banded watch that Tom had given her before their marriage; it was not luminous. With her spectacles on, a black hat pulled onto her head and a dark fur coat wrapped round her shoulders, she was ready.

Her husband, too, took care with his clothes. Tom usually wore the garments of a laborer: dungarees and rough work wear. Today he donned a dark three-piece suit with a sober striped tie; his thick hair and mustache were neatly combed, and he also wore glasses. Having added a light-colored trilby, he was set to carry Catherine to court.

But he could not do it alone. Clarence Witt, the husband of Olive, helped him. Catherine was seated on a blond wood chair as they lifted her; her skin bruised so easily and her bones were now so fragile that it was difficult for Tom to carry her in his arms, next to his chest: the chair was a safer choice. They carried her all the way to the courtroom and then went up to the fourth floor, where Grossman greeted them, coming to assist.

As they helped her into one of the courtroom’s black chairs, Catherine gazed around at the nondescript room. As it was a hearing before the Industrial Commission, it looked more like a meeting room than a court; it was, in fact, the office of the county auditor. It had a diamond-patterned tiled floor and was dominated by a large wooden table with sturdy legs; chairs were set around it for the key players and then ranged in semicircles beyond that for spectators.

Catherine’s friends were already there, including Pearl Payne and Marie Rossiter, yet the women weren’t the only ones present. Just as the New Jersey girls’ case had done a decade before, the women’s plight had captured the imagination of the nation: reporters and photographers from across the country thronged the room.

Although the media had turned out for the trial, it seemed the Radium Dial executives had not. Neither had all its legal team, for only Arthur Magid was present, seated next to the arbitrator (judge) at the big table. There was no Walter Bachrach, no Mr. Reed, no President Ganley, no one but Magid to represent the firm. Perhaps they thought it was beneath their attention, or perhaps some other reason kept them from the court.

Catherine looked closely at the judge: this was the man who would decide her fate. George B. Marvel was sixty-seven years old: a round-faced gentleman with white hair and spectacles, which he wore positioned toward the end of his small nose. He had been a lawyer and bank president prior to joining the Industrial Commission; Catherine wondered what he would make of her case.

As she took in her surroundings, waiting for the trial to begin at 9:00 a.m., the press took in the sight of her. “Mrs. Donohue,” the Chicago Herald-Examiner later wrote, “could hardly stand alone. Her arms were no larger than a child’s and her face was drawn and pinched. Her dark eyes burned feverishly behind rimless glasses.”1 The Chicago Daily Times, somewhat unkindly, called her a “toothpick woman.”2

Catherine sat at the main table, with Tom seated just behind her. She carefully pulled off her big fur coat and placed it neatly on her lap, but she kept her hat on; she seemed to be cold all the time these days, frozen by the lack of fat on her body and by her failing heart. Feeling the pus starting to ooze again in her mouth, she pulled out a patterned handkerchief and kept it by her. She seemed almost constantly to have to hold it to her mouth.

Grossman checked with her to see if she was ready and she nodded briskly. The lawyer was dressed in his usual three-piece tweed suit, his eyes bright with anticipation of the job ahead. For more than half a year he had worked tirelessly on the women’s case: he knew both he and Catherine were well prepared.

“We do not belong,” Grossman stated in his opening to the case, “to that resigned class of victims who stretch forth unsuspecting throats to the sharpened sword of even so distinguished an adversary as the law firms of record for respondent in this case… Under the intrepid Illinois Industrial Commission, larger and larger grows the brightening rainbow of our hopes for the right against the wrong, and the weak against the strong.

“Human lives,” he continued, bringing his introduction round to the woman at the center of the case, “were saved among our country’s army of defense, because Catherine Donohue painted luminous dials on instruments for our forces. To make life safe, she and her coworkers [are] among the living dead. They have sacrificed their own lives. Truly an unsung heroine of our country, our state and country owe her a debt.”3

Now, it was that unsung heroine’s turn to speak. Seated at the central table, with Grossman by her side and Magid and Marvel opposite her, Catherine was the first to give evidence. Though she wanted desperately to come across as strong, her voice, projecting through her battered mouth, betrayed her. The papers commented on her “weak and muffled voice,”4 which was “faltering”5 and “barely audible even to [her friends] who sat in a circle behind her chair.”6

But speak she did, describing her work, the way the powder covered the girls all over and made them glow, the practice of lip-pointing. “That’s the way this terrible poison got into our systems,” she cried. “We never even knew it was harmful.”7

Grossman gave her an encouraging smile; she was doing brilliantly. While Catherine took a quick drink of water, her lawyer now introduced into evidence the deceitful full-page advert that Radium Dial had printed in the local paper.

“Objection,” Magid was reported to say, rising, but George Marvel allowed it to stand.

“After those New Jersey people died from radium poisoning in 1928,” Catherine continued, “we began to get alarmed. But shortly after that Mr. Reed called our attention to [this] advertisement. He said we did not have to worry.”8

Marvel nodded slowly, taking notes and reviewing every word of the controversial notice. Catherine kept on with her testimony, looking over her shoulder at her friends, who sat in a row listening intently to her speak. “After Miss Marie Rossiter and I had been examined the first time,” she recalled, turning back to face the judge, “we wanted to know why we didn’t get our reports. Mr. Reed said to us, ‘My dear girls, if we ever give a medical report to you, there will be a riot in this place.’ Neither of us then realized what he meant.”9

But they did now. As Catherine described the encounter in court, Marie “paled at her words.”10

“Oh!”11 she cried aloud, the implication of her manager’s words sinking in.

“That is the Mr. Reed,”12 Catherine added pointedly to the judge, “who is still with the company in New York.”

The papers had found him there, overseeing the dial-painting girls. He had “assumed responsibility for the operation,” which could well have been a promotion, since the New York plant was far more prestigious than the one in Ottawa. The company, it seemed, rewarded loyalty from its employees.

There was a disturbance then, as the chief security examiner of the commission came rushing into the room, bringing documents that Grossman had subpoenaed. The lawyer quickly flicked through the files. He could see at once that the girls’ test results from 1925 and 1928 were not included. There were, however, some letters of especial interest.

Kelly, the president of Radium Dial, had written to the Illinois Industrial Commission in 1928:

We have not been successful in obtaining compensation insurance since the cancellation of our policy [on] August 18 1928. In view of the publicity given the so-called radium poisoning cases of the United States Radium Corporation of New York, the [insurance company] decided they did not care to carry the insurance any longer and incur the risk of our having such cases at our plant in Ottawa, Illinois.14

Kelly had applied to ten different insurance firms. All had turned him down.

“You can readily see,” Kelly continued, “that it makes it rather an unfortunate situation for us. Can you advise us how WE may obtain protection? Does the State of Illinois have any compensation insurance?”15

Kelly’s only thought was how he could protect the financial assets of his company; he didn’t seem to consider that perhaps the insurance companies were refusing to cover him because what he was doing was too dangerous to support. In response, the commission told him: “The only thing you can do is to carry your own risk.”16

Kelly had decided it was worth a punt. That was why there were no insurance-company lawyers at this trial: because Radium Dial had no insurers. On October 30, 1930, the IIC gave notice to Radium Dial that it had not complied with the Workmen’s Compensation Act, which required insurance; in response, Radium Dial “was forced to post securities and offer guarantees with the Industrial Commission that it was carrying its own risk.”17 And this is when Radium Dial paid to the commission the $10,000 that Catherine and her friends were now trying to share between them. This was how that meager pot of money came to be.

And there was no more money. Grossman had had no luck in tracing Radium Dial assets for the girls to claim from; now that the firm had fled to New York, it seems the Illinois Industrial Commission had no power to reach across state lines to commandeer any of the company’s funds. It was financially disappointing, but in many ways this case was not about the money. It would make a difference, sure—Tom and Catherine in particular would be saved from destitution if they won—but it was more important to the women by far that what had happened to them be recognized. The girls had been shunned, told they were liars and cheats and frauds; they had seen the company literally get away with murder. The truth was what they were fighting for.

To the almost continuous objections of Arthur Magid, which were all overruled, Catherine now told of her and Charlotte’s visit to Mr. Reed after they’d been diagnosed. “Mr. Reed said he didn’t think anything was wrong with us,”18 Catherine whispered, as angrily as her weakened voice would allow. “He refused to consider our request for compensation.”19

Marvel nodded, transfixed by Catherine. “Her emaciated body [was] shaking”20 but she didn’t let it stop her.

“After two years,” she said, remembering back to 1924, “I began to feel pains in my left ankle, which spread up to my hip. Fainting spells also occurred. At night the pain became unbearable.”21

She told of how her pains had spread, all across her body: her ankles, her hips, her knees, her teeth; how she had become a bedridden invalid, unable to eat, unable to care for her own children. And then, as her fingers twisted a scapular medal—a Catholic talisman—she told of no longer being able to kneel to pray. With immense pathos she described her suffering—and not just her own. Catherine told the court how her two children were also affected.

Shortly before her testimony ended, Catherine reached for her purse and withdrew a small jewelry box, which she held discreetly on her lap. She and Grossman had discussed this beforehand, so he asked her about the exhibit she had brought. Catherine bent her head to the box and lifted it up with her thin hands. The court leaned in, wanting to know what was inside. Slowly, very slowly, she opened it. And then, from within it, she withdrew two fragments of bone.

“These are pieces of my jawbone,” she said simply. “They were removed from my jaw.”22

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