فصل 54

کتاب: دختران رادیوم / فصل 55

فصل 54

توضیح مختصر

  • زمان مطالعه 0 دقیقه
  • سطح خیلی سخت

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

این فصل را می‌توانید به بهترین شکل و با امکانات عالی در اپلیکیشن «زیبوک» بخوانید

دانلود اپلیکیشن «زیبوک»

فایل صوتی

برای دسترسی به این محتوا بایستی اپلیکیشن زبانشناس را نصب کنید.

متن انگلیسی فصل

54

There was no time to tell the Donohues. Grossman managed to summon those few former dial-painters now living in Chicago—Charlotte Purcell and Helen Munch—and they alone were able to reach the hearing in time; it was held just before noon. Helen was nervously smoking a cigarette as they all crowded into the wood-paneled IIC room to hear the verdict. George Marvel’s judgment was read aloud by the chairman of the commission. Both Magid and Grossman stood to hear him speak; the two attorneys sized each other up as the chairman called for silence.

Mrs. Donohue, Marvel had written, was suffering from a disease that was “slow, insidious in its nature, progressive, and extending over a long period of years.”1 He concluded: “The disablement sustained made Mrs. Donohue incapable of following any gainful occupation.”2 Those in the court shifted restlessly; they knew all this. The question was: would he find the company at fault?

The written judgment proceeded. “The Industrial Commission finds that…a relation of employer and employee existed between the company and the plaintiff… [Catherine Donohue’s] disability did arise out of and come in the course of her employment.”3

He had found the company guilty.

Charlotte and Helen could not help their reaction: they were jubilant. Helen stretched out a grateful hand to Grossman as he turned to them with an irrepressible grin. “I am very glad for Mrs. Donohue,” Helen breathed, “it is a just decision.”4

Marvel awarded Catherine her past medical expenses, back salary for the entire period she had not been able to find employment due to her condition, damages, and an annual life pension of $277 ($4,656) for the remainder of her life. It came to a total of some $5,661 ($95,160) and was the maximum possible award the judge could deliver under the provisions of the law.

One suspects that he wished he could have gone further. Marvel was reported to have said after Catherine’s collapse in the courthouse: “It would seem to me [from] what has been disclosed here that there could have been a common-law action against these people. There is and has been a gross negligence on the part of [the] Radium Dial Company.”5

The company officials were guilty. Guilty of causing Catherine’s disablement—and Charlotte’s too—but not just that alone. They were guilty of killing Peg Looney, Ella Cruse, Inez Vallat…so many more. Those women’s lives could not be saved, but their murderers were now unveiled in the cold light of day. “The whole creation of God,” Grossman had written in his legal brief, “has neither nook nor corner where the Radium Dial Company can hide the secret of its guilt in this case and escape.”6 The light of justice now flooded in, leaving the callous killers exposed for what they were. There was no full-page ad to hide behind here; no jolly superintendent smoothing down the girls’ furrowed brows; no hidden test results that kept the truth concealed. The truth, after all these years, was finally out.

“Justice has triumphed!” declared Grossman exultantly at the hearing. “No other decision is possible under the overwhelming weight of evidence. A just award follows the rule of conscience. Thank God for justice to the living dead.”7

Charlotte Purcell simply said, thankfully, “This is the first ray of hope we have had after years of discouragement.”8

It had been a long, long battle. In many ways, it was a battle that had begun on February 5, 1925, when Marguerite Carlough had first filed suit in New Jersey: the very first dial-painter ever to fight back. Catherine’s triumph in court, thirteen years later, was one of the first cases in which an employer was made responsible for the health of its employees. What the girls had achieved was astonishing: a ground-breaking, law-changing, and life-saving accomplishment. The Attorney General’s office, which had followed the case closely, heralded the verdict as “a great victory.”9

It was the Ottawa Daily Times that claimed to break the news to Catherine Donohue. As the verdict came down the wire, a reporter raced to 520 East Superior Street to talk to the woman at the center of it all.

He found her alone; Tom had taken the children for a walk. She was—as she had no choice but to be—lying in bed in the front room, her silver-banded watch still hanging loosely on her wrist. As the reporter excitedly told her that a verdict had been given, five days early, Catherine blinked in surprise. “I never dreamed of the decision this soon,”10 she croaked with great effort.

The good news spilled from the journalist’s lips: a secret he could not wait to share. Yet Catherine was so ill, she showed little emotion at her victory and did not smile. Tom would later confide that she “cries but rarely smiles; she has forgotten how to laugh.”11

It could have been that she did not quite believe it. “She half rose in bed in an effort to look at the compensation decision, which was written out for her,”12 but she did not have the strength to do so fully. She sank back against the pillows; and as the news, too, sank in, her primary thought was for Tom. “Her first words,” wrote the eager journalist, “formed a wish that her husband Thomas would quickly hear of the decision.”13

“I am glad for the sake of my children and my husband,” Catherine whispered. “The lump sums will help [Tom], who has been out of work for many months.”14

As though remembering, she then said with a weak smile to the reporter: “This is the second good news we had in a week. My husband just got back on the payroll at the glass factory.”15 Some workers had been recalled to Libbey-Owens, and Tom had managed to get on the night shift.

As the reporter lingered in the room, hoping for more copy, Catherine spoke on. “The judge is grand,” she commented. “He’s so wonderful. He’s very fair. That means a lot.”16

As though the idea of fairness had triggered something in her, an anger blazed within her for a brief moment. “It should have been done a long time ago,” she said, almost bitterly. “I’ve been suffering. I’ll have to suffer more.”17 She went on: “I wonder if I will live to receive any of the money; I hope so. But I am afraid it will come too late.”18

Yet Catherine had not put her life at risk for herself; she had done it for her family and friends. “Now maybe [Tom] and our two children can really live again,” she said in hope. “I may not live to enjoy the money myself, but [I hope] it will come in time for the other girls. I hope they get it before their conditions become as bad as mine.”19

She added one final comment, a croaked whisper that fell flat in the oddly quiet, stale-aired room, which held none of the jubilation of the courtroom in Chicago.

“I hope the lawyers don’t upset it…”20 Catherine Donohue said.

مشارکت کنندگان در این صفحه

تا کنون فردی در بازسازی این صفحه مشارکت نداشته است.

🖊 شما نیز می‌توانید برای مشارکت در ترجمه‌ی این صفحه یا اصلاح متن انگلیسی، به این لینک مراجعه بفرمایید.