فصل 53

53

Spring is in the Air!1 chorused the Chicago Daily Times the weekend after the trial. The newspapers were full of Valentine’s adverts for romantic gifts, bridge parties, and dances, but there was only one date that the dial-painters of Ottawa were keeping; and that was with Catherine Donohue.

They found her in good spirits when they called on her. When a reporter tagging along asked Catherine “what slim thread binds her to life,”2 she replied, “It’s the fighting Irish,” with a fond glance at Tom. “I will live,”3 she said determinedly. Doctors had said that she would “never leave her bed alive,”4 but she was not done fighting yet.

Together, the women prayed for a cure, yet “there was no horror among them of death itself.”5 “Each declared,” said the Chicago Herald-Examiner, “that if the fates decree, she will face the next world with the realization that her sacrifice may have saved others.”6

For the women, somewhat to their surprise, had become poster girls for workers’ rights. Already, they had effected a significant change in the law that protected thousands of vulnerable employees and removed a loophole by which corporations could shirk their responsibilities. Inspired by what they had achieved, that same day Pearl Payne wrote to Grossman with an idea:

Sensing your humanitarian zeal for helping those on the lower rungs of life’s ladder, it has occurred to me as well as the other participants in the Radium Dial suit that you forge the beginning of a society, whereby those, of which there must be thousands, could band together, secure legal aid and in general use our organized presence to simplify, promote, and improve the laws relative to those who are maimed due to occupational hazards.7

Grossman thought it brilliant. And so, on Saturday, February 26, 1938, the society had its first meeting. The founding members were Pearl Payne, Marie Rossiter, Charlotte Purcell, and Catherine Donohue. Three of the four went to Chicago to meet Grossman; Catherine, far too ill to travel, was represented by Tom. They called themselves, with an instinct for a media hook that possibly came from Grossman, The Society of the Living Dead.

“The purpose of the society,” announced Grossman to the gathered press, “is to obtain better protection by legislation and otherwise for persons endangered by occupational diseases.”8

The meeting coincided with the filing of Grossman’s first legal brief to Marvel, which was probably deliberate (“He loved the press,”9 said his son). As the camera bulbs flashed, Grossman gave the girls their own copy of the pale green brief, signing Pearl’s with the slogan “In Humanity’s Cause.”10 The dense document was some eighty thousand words in length, and it saw Grossman in full flow.

The circumstances call for the sharpest pen I can unsheathe. I ask simply that [the law’s] protecting folds ever serve as a shield to protect, and not a sword to destroy the human right of Catherine Donohue to compensation. Give Catherine only what is justly and rightly due her under the law of God and Man, and you will give her the award we ask!

The brief was filed in the late afternoon, just in time to catch the evening papers, and the press were all over it; coverage of the case jostled for space on the front page with stories about the Nazis in Germany. And if it was a trial by media, the girls would have won hands down—the papers called Radium Dial “criminally careless.”12

The press asked Tom Donohue if there was any hope of a cure. He replied that Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor, had “sent medical authorities to investigate.”13 There’d been some hope that a calcium treatment might prolong Catherine’s life, but her illness was too advanced for her to survive the process. The federal investigations Perkins had ordered into the women’s poisoning, meanwhile, appear to have come to nothing. The government, struck by a double-dip recession within the Great Depression, had other priorities. One politician admitted they were “floundering”14 about the economy: “We have pulled all the rabbits out of the hat, and there are no more rabbits,”15 he said. It was cold comfort to Tom, who was still without a job.

Although the calcium treatment was not possible, Catherine still refused to surrender. “I am hoping for a miracle,” she said. “I pray for it. I want a claim to life, and to stave off the end for the sake of my husband and children.”16 Catherine’s own mom had died when she was six; she knew what it was like to grow up without a mother and she was determined her own children would not suffer the same fate.

But for all Catherine’s courageous talk, as the weeks passed and they all waited for the verdict, her health deteriorated rapidly. “Once that [stage of the] illness began,” remembered her niece Mary, “it was just like a spiral down, down, down… It wasn’t a gradual thing. It was fast.”17

It left Catherine utterly unable even to direct her children’s care via the housekeeper. “She was so ill,” said Mary, “I truly do not remember her interacting with the children. She wasn’t able. You can’t imagine… It had just sapped all the energy and everything out of her.”18

All Catherine could do was lie weakly on her bed in the front room with the shades drawn. Her days were punctuated by the taking of her medicine, and by the frequent rattle of the train tracks behind the house: the sound of carriages bearing people away on journeys that Catherine Donohue could never now undertake. The house had “a smell of urine.”19 Her entire world was that front room. She lay under a blanket, the tumor on her hip a malignant mountain rising beneath, with every bone in her body aching. She was in so much pain.

“I just remember her moaning, moaning,” remembered Mary quietly. “You knew that she was in pain, but she didn’t have the energy to scream. Moaning was about the best she could do. I think she just didn’t have the energy to cry or cry out. She’d just moan.

“I can’t describe,” she went on, “how sad that house was. You felt the sadness when you came in there.”20

As Catherine’s illness worsened, some of her relatives considered her condition too horrific for her young nieces and nephews to see. “She was falling apart from the radium,” recalled her niece Agnes. “They didn’t want us to see her; they said she looked so terrible.”21 So although Agnes’s parents would visit Catherine once a week, she always had to wait outside.

One relative who became a frequent visitor was Tom’s big sister Margaret. She was a stocky fifty-one-year-old woman who was “the boss of the family.”22 “She was the only woman that I knew of that could drive,” recalled her nephew James. “She had an automobile called the Whippet.”23 Another relative remarked: “She’d go take care of [Catherine] and take care of the kids. She did what a good sister-in-law would do.”24

Father Griffin was another regular visitor, and Catherine welcomed the nuns from the convent too, who brought her a relic of the True Cross. “It is like having God in the house with me,”25 she exclaimed in elation.

She also took solace from an unexpected source: the public. With her story emblazoned across the newspapers, readers were horrified by it in a way that some of the women’s neighbors had never been. Catherine received hundreds of “lovely letters”26 that came from coast to coast. People sent her trinkets and ideas for cures; money for flowers to brighten her sickroom; some simply wrote in the hope that “my letter will cheer you a little.”27 “You have my sympathy and my greatest desire for a complete victory,” read one. “And I know millions of people think the same.”28

Her friends also lifted her spirits. Marie would spend an evening with her, sitting by the side of the wrought-iron bed; Olive “brought me a chicken all cooked up lovely,” Catherine wrote to Pearl with pleasure. “She, like you dear, are truly pals, and may God bless you both.”29

By March, Catherine had cheered considerably. “I’m sitting up for a few minutes today,” she wrote proudly to Pearl, “and oh, how good it feels after so long in bed!”30

Leonard Grossman had not seen his bed for a very, very long time, or so it seemed. Throughout February and March, there was a convoluted exchange of briefs as he and Magid dueled with pen-swords in further book-length submissions to Marvel. “He worked around the clock for a week,” said Grossman’s son. “He had three or four secretaries in.”31 This crack team of assistants took dictation as Grossman paced his office or sat in his big chair with a cigar and reeled off the brilliant oratory for which he was famous. “I have been busy day and night,” Grossman later wrote to Pearl, “working on the radium case.”32

On March 28, 1938, the final brief was filed: after consideration of this, Marvel would deliver his verdict. In it, Grossman denigrated the company’s “shameful, shifting defense”33 and what he called “the cesspools in respondent’s alibis,” and continued: “Language can coin no fitting words of odium with which to condemn the cool, calculating [Radium Dial Company]. [Workers were] lulled into a false sense of security by dastardly and diabolical false and fraudulent misrepresentations.” The company knew, he wrote, “the legal duties which it owed to [its employees] and murderously refused them.” Its officials repeatedly lied to Catherine “to induce her and other employees to remain quiescent and not aroused and not aware of her true condition.” They had, he said, “betrayed her.”

He did not mince his words. “I cannot imagine a fiend fresh from the profoundest depths of perdition committing such an unnatural crime as the Radium Dial Company did. My God! Is the radium industry utterly destitute of shame? Is the Radium Dial Company utterly dominated by a beast?

“It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,” he concluded, “and, just incidentally, against the law.”

He wrote powerfully. The judge had declared that he would not make a final ruling until April 10—yet on Tuesday, April 5, the telephone burred in Grossman’s office. He was summoned to the headquarters of the IIC at 205 West Wacker Drive, just around the corner from the Metropolitan Building.

The verdict was in.