فصل 52

52

When Friday, February 11, dawned, Catherine Donohue was still alive. The weather outside on East Superior Street was “unsettled,”1 but Catherine, despite her weakened condition, felt certain of what she had to do.

“It’s too late for me,” she said bravely, “but maybe it will help some of the others. If I win this fight, my children will be safe and my friends who worked with me and contracted the same disease will win too.”2

It had been agreed by Radium Dial that Catherine’s would stand as a test case. If the court found for her, then all the other victims would find justice as well. It made it all the more important to her that she did not fall at this final hurdle; she had to fight on, come what may.

Tom supported her decision to testify, but he was worried sick. “All this is too late for us,” he echoed, “but Catherine wants to do all she can to help the others. Even if the excitement—”3

His voice broke off abruptly. He had heard what the doctors had said: that continuing as a witness could prove fatal. But Catherine was determined; and who was he to stand in her way? “We’ve had so little time together,”4 he simply said, quietly. They had been married just six years.

Tommy and Mary Jane, then aged four and three, were at home. They played upstairs as the mass of visitors was directed to the dining room, where Catherine lay on the blue sofa, pillows propping her up and a white blanket covering her to her chin. One after another the guests crowded into the room, some thirty people in all—lawyers, witnesses, reporters, and friends.

Catherine barely had the strength to open her eyes to welcome them. She made a “pathetic spectacle”5; her friends greeted her with evident concern. They usually visited this place socially, but today was a very different occasion. The women sat on chairs lined up by the sofa: Charlotte Purcell, who had come down from Chicago, was closest to Catherine; she sat next to Pearl. Charlotte had declined rapidly of late, having lost a tooth only the week before. She sat huddled in a thick gray coat, its left sleeve hanging empty by her side.

The lawyers drew up chairs at the round oak table and spread their papers across it: Grossman, Magid, and Marvel, with Grossman’s secretary, Carol, taking notes. Conscious of his children upstairs, Tom hovered halfway between the dining room and the rest of the house, leaning disconsolately against the doorjamb.

The scene thus set, the hearing now began. “Weak but determined, Catherine Donohue was ready to resume her story.”6

As Grossman questioned his client, he knelt by her side so that she could hear him better. She answered him “through closed eyes.”7 Only occasionally would she open them, and even then she didn’t really seem to see.

“Show us,” Grossman encouraged, “how you were taught to point [the brush], as you described in testimony yesterday.”8 He held out a child’s paintbrush toward her, taken from Tommy’s watercolor set.

As Catherine reached out a skeletal hand from beneath her blanket to take the brush, Arthur Magid rose from where he was seated at the table. “Objection,” he said. “We object to the use of the brush, as there is no proof it is the same type as that used in the plant.”9

Marvel turned to Grossman. “Is there one you could get?”10 he asked.

“Yes,” replied Grossman somewhat tartly. “They are being used now at the Luminous Processes plant, which is using all the equipment of the Radium Dial Company, and employs some of the company’s girls. There’s even an official there who was at the Radium Dial Company.”11

“It was decided,” wrote a reporter after witnessing this exchange, “that the brush could be used for the demonstration.”12 Catherine took the delicate paintbrush proffered by her lawyer. She paused for a moment, feeling its barely-there weight in her hand, the way her fingers curled familiarly around it. “Here’s how it’s done,”13 she croaked, after a beat. Her voice sounded tired. “We dipped it in the radium compound mixture.”14 Catherine dabbed the brush into an imaginary crucible and then, very slowly, bent her stiff arm back and raised the brush to her lips. “Then shaped it,” she said with some emotion, “like this.”15 She slipped the brush between her lips and twirled it. Lip… Dip… Paint. When she was finished, she held it up with a shaking hand: the bristles now tapered to a perfect point. Seeing it, “a shudder ran through her trembling frame.”16

Her friends and former colleagues watched her with their faces “drawn with emotional intensity.”17 The women were visibly affected by her demonstration and fought back tears.

“I did this thousands and thousands of times,”18 Catherine said dully. “That was the way we were told to do it.”19

Tom watched his wife from the doorway—watched as she demonstrated how she had been killed. Though he had thought himself wrung out of tears, he wept quietly, unashamedly, as Catherine showed off the simple movement that had left her little more than a living corpse.

Grossman cut through the chilling atmosphere in the room with a question. “Did any official of Radium Dial ever tell you that the U.S. Government had condemned the use of camel-hair brushes in painting with radium compounds?”20

Catherine looked shocked to hear it. “No,” she replied. The girls sitting behind her exchanged looks of anger.

“Objection,” piped up Magid, almost speaking over Catherine.

“Sustained,” responded Marvel.

Grossman wasn’t thrown off-track; he had another query. “Was there any notice posted arising from the dangers of radium dial-painting with the hair brushes?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Catherine replied surely, “there was none. We even ate our lunches on the work tables near the luminous paint. Our superintendent, Reed, told us it was all right to eat there, but not to let the food spot the dials. All they told us”—she was panting now with the effort of speaking—“was to be careful not to get any grease spots on the dials.”21

Grossman touched her gently on the shoulder. She was exhausted, he could tell. He carefully took her through the remaining key points, including the debacle of the glass pens and the way she had been fired for limping, and then he let her rest.

He called Charlotte Purcell to take the oath.

“Objection,” called out Magid immediately. He didn’t want the other girls to give evidence, citing the fact that this was Catherine’s case alone.

“This is a test case, Your Honor,” Grossman cut in smoothly, appealing to Marvel. “I don’t know that I will have these girls with me at any future time.” His eyes scanned the row of young women sitting alongside Catherine’s makeshift bed. “Not all of them,”22 he added pointedly.

Marvel nodded. He allowed the women to be questioned, though the girls “were not permitted to testify directly about their own conditions.”23

As Charlotte stood up to give evidence, Pearl helped her to slip her gray coat from her shoulders. Underneath she was wearing a green blouse with a fussy white collar; its sleeve “hung limply, revealing her amputated arm.”24 She came to the table to take the oath. Then she too twirled the brush in her mouth, showing her missing teeth as she did so. She testified calmly, as the anxious eyes of her friends followed her evidence. One girl’s eyes filled with tears as Charlotte talked.

“Were you employed,” Grossman asked her, “at the Radium Dial Company when Catherine Donohue was employed there, in the same room?”25

“Yes, sir,” said Charlotte. Her stronger speech was in direct contrast to the strained whisper that had been all Catherine could manage.

“Did you have your left arm then?”

Charlotte swallowed hard. “Yes, sir.”

“How long were you employed there?” he asked.

“Thirteen months,” she said, almost spitting out the words.

He asked her about the confrontation she and Catherine had had with Mr. Reed. “Did you have your arm then?”

“No, sir,” she replied bluntly.

“What did Mr. Reed say?”

“Mr. Reed,” said Charlotte, her eyes burning angrily, “said he didn’t think there was any such thing as radium poisoning.” She testified “the loss of her arm was due to the poisonous compound used.”26

One by one, Grossman called the girls to give evidence, which they did sitting alongside the lawyers at the Donohues’ dining table. Marie Rossiter clenched and unclenched her fingers as she reported what had gone on.

“Mr. Reed said radium would put rosy cheeks on us,” she remembered in disgust, “that it was good for us.”27

Grossman asked each of them in turn if the painting demonstrations had been an accurate reenactment of the technique they’d been taught. Like a row of doppelg?ngers, each nodded her head.

All the women testified on Catherine’s behalf: Pearl Payne, the Glacinski sisters, Olive Witt, and Helen Munch too. As each woman stood up, literally and figuratively, for her friend, she was mirrored by Arthur Magid, who continually objected to their evidence. Tom Donohue spoke only briefly, to confirm the calamitous amount of debt that he and Catherine were in due to her medical bills.

Throughout it all, Catherine herself lay dumbly on the sofa, sometimes dozing to the lullaby of her friends’ voices as they lilted around her. At last, it came to an end. Across the two days, fourteen witnesses had given evidence for Catherine. Now, Grossman rested his case and everyone turned expectantly to Arthur Magid.

But the company lawyer presented no evidence and called not a single witness. The firm was standing solely on its legal defense that radium was not poisonous.

With no further evidence to hear, shortly after 1:00 p.m. Marvel formally closed the hearing. He would, he said, give his verdict in a month or so; before then, both sides would have opportunity to submit complex written legal briefs, which set out their arguments in full.

There was just one final element to the proceedings—an opportunity that the gathered reporters would never have let pass them by. Before the throng of people departed from the Donohue home, the media requested a photo call. George Marvel and Arthur Magid both moved behind the sofa as Grossman knelt beside Catherine; a cigar was already between his fingers now the case was at rest. As the men came into her line of vision, Catherine stretched out a thin hand toward George Marvel. He took it, clutching her fingertips gently, shocked at her emaciated bones, at how delicate her hand was. Catherine, later, deemed him “so sympathetic.”28

It wasn’t just the attorneys who were required in the shot. Catherine’s friends, too, surrounded her once the lawyers moved away. Charlotte perched on the arm of the sofa at her feet, while the others stood behind. Pearl Payne was in the center, holding her hand. All the women were looking at Catherine—but Catherine was looking at Tom. He had come forward now that the hearing was over, and seated himself by her side. As the camera clicked, the husband and wife had eyes only for each other.

“Suddenly,” a reporter later wrote of seeing Tom and Catherine together, “I forgot her crumbled teeth, the shattered jaws…I forgot the tragic remnants that radium poisoning left of a once-handsome woman…I saw briefly [instead] the soul that holds her husband’s love—[a] love grown blind to the fragile shell of a woman that is all other people see.”29

There was just one other photograph. Hearing the meeting was over, Tommy and Mary Jane came running into the room. Tom lifted them up, one in each arm, and sat them on the back of the sofa so that Catherine could see her children. And now, for the first time all morning, she came alive again, reaching out to hold Tommy’s hand with an animated expression on her face as she chatted to her boy and girl. Mary Jane had sweet bobbed hair with a ribbon in it and wore a colored dress; Tommy was in a long white shirt. Both seemed somewhat overwhelmed at all the guests and the photographers, and shortly afterwards Tom ushered everybody out.

Grossman and the other girls went directly to a downtown hotel, where they conferred at length before Grossman left for Chicago. The women knew that whatever happened next, it would affect them all. Even that day at the hearing, Magid had confirmed once again that, whatever the judge’s decision, the firm would abide by it in handling the other dial-painters’ claims.

With the hullabaloo of the court all gone, Tom shut the door of 520 East Superior Street. Somehow, the house seemed even quieter than it had before the hearing.

Now, all he and Catherine could do was wait.