فصل 55

55

Two weeks after the judgment, Radium Dial filed an appeal against the verdict, “upon contention the award was contrary to the evidence.”1 Having anticipated such a move, Grossman and the Society of the Living Dead instantly staged a media photo call and launched an appeal for immediate funds for Catherine. “She has no money, no prospects of getting any through her own efforts, [and] mounting doctor’s bills,” declared Charlotte Purcell. “I fear Mrs. Donohue will die before her case is adjudicated.”2

Catherine was touched by her friends’ support, but her overwhelming concern was for Tom. He had taken the news of the appeal hard. “He doesn’t say much,” Catherine confided to Pearl, “but it has been such a strain on him.”3

The women continued to enlist the help of the media in their campaign for justice; the Donohues invited the Toronto Star into their home for an interview. “The eggshell woman in the bed may be dying,” wrote Star journalist Frederick Griffin, “but she is fighting.”4

They were all fighting—the women, and their supporters too. As Griffin visited 520 East Superior Street one quiet April evening, he met all the dial-painters who had filed suit, as well as the men standing behind them: Inez’s father George; Tom, Al, Clarence, and Hobart. This senseless tragedy had affected them as well as their wives and daughters. “They’re scared,” Clarence Witt said of the women, as his wife readied Catherine in the other room. “Every little ache or pain scares them.”5

It was now more than two months since Catherine had battled to give her evidence from her sickbed; the intervening weeks had wrought havoc with her body. “I looked at the shrunken face, arms, form, the shapeless jaw, and mouth,” Griffin remembered as he entered her makeshift bedroom. “A glance at her skeleton outline beneath the coverlet makes you wonder if she will see the week out.”6

Yet as Catherine fluttered open her eyes and fixed them on the reporter, he realized that she had more grit in her than he’d thought. “Mrs. Donohue, this remnant of a woman, took on her role as president of this strange society,” he later wrote. “She lay motionless, but she was business-like.”

“Please publish this,” she said candidly. “I want you, when you write about us, to put in a good word for our lawyer, Mr. Grossman.”

She was commanding; her voice at this meeting, Griffin said, was “brisk” and “strong.” Grossman had paid for the entire legal proceedings himself—including the continuing expenses of the appeal—and Catherine wanted to be sure he would be rewarded with publicity at least.

“You hear the voice of the Society of the Living Dead,” Grossman himself now intoned. “That is the voice of the ghost women speaking not only here in this room but to the world. This voice is going to strike the shackles off the industrial slaves of America. You girls have rights to better laws. That’s what the society is going to work for.”

Griffin interviewed them all; each woman had her own heartrending story. “I’d hate to tell you [how I feel now],” Marie sighed. “My ankles and jaw pain [me] all the time.”

“I don’t know what day’s going to be my last,” said Olive anxiously. “I lie at night staring at the ceiling and thinking maybe it’s my last on earth.”

“It is an effort to do things in the ordinary way, to act normally,” confessed Pearl. “I don’t show it, but at present I am nervous and shaking. What I have lost I can never recover.

“I am missing so much,” she almost cried out. “The chance of being a mother again…I can never be the mother and wife that my fine husband deserves.”

As for Catherine, she suddenly burst out with just three words: “All are gone!” Perhaps, like Katherine Schaub, she had a chorus of ghost girls playing in her head: Ella and Peg and Mary and Inez…

“The words,” remarked Griffin, “came unexpectedly and strong. There was silence again.”

For Tom Donohue, listening in, it was too much. He spoke up bitterly, his voice quivering. “We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,” he spat out. “These women have souls.”

Griffin asked one final question before he took his leave. “How do you keep up your morale?”

It was Catherine who answered, “unexpectedly with startling effect and strength,” she said. “By our faith in God!”

But though Catherine’s faith was as strong as it had ever been, as the days went by her body weakened. Just a week or so later, she wrote to Pearl: “Tried to write sooner but somehow I can’t write anymore. It is so difficult for me to get up for any length of time and when I do I’m all in for a week afterwards.”7 The continuing legal trouble was not helping her. “I only wish my case was through with,” she said wistfully. “Lord knows I need the medical care, and need it badly.”8

Though her friends tried to rally round her—Olive brought fruit and a pail of fresh eggs, and Pearl even bought her a new nightgown from the meager funds she and Hobart had to spare—Catherine’s body refused to respond to their comforting gestures. She suffered excruciating, constant pain that required the continuous administration of narcotics. Her jawbone continued to fracture into ever-smaller fragments, each new break more painful than the last, and with the new breaks came a new development.

Catherine started hemorrhaging from her jaw.

She lost approximately one pint of blood each time. Though she wanted to stay at home with Tom, her physician Dr. Dunn rushed her to hospital—what Catherine called “a hurried-up trip.”9 “I want to be home,” she wrote forlornly to Pearl from her hospital bed. “Am so lonesome… Doctor wants me here; Tom wants a nurse at home. I just don’t know what to do. I suffer so much pain.”10 She begged Pearl to visit her: “Come over if possible, won’t you, as soon as you get this letter? I’m so lonesome and blue.”11

Dr. Dunn was increasingly concerned for Catherine. Though he kept her in the hospital for several weeks, her condition was terminal; she was so weak that he thought the slightest labor could be lethal. He issued a formal statement: “In my opinion any unusual stress such as a court appearance might prove fatal. I have advised and urged her to forgo any such activity.”12

But this was Catherine Donohue he was talking about. No matter what her doctor said, she was determined to fight Radium Dial tooth and nail. The company was not going to get away with it this time. Released from hospital by the start of June 1938, she was home just in time to hold a meeting at her house the day before the appeal hearing. Grossman and the other women were there. “There’s not much hope for me now,” Catherine said to them, acknowledging it. “I only have to wait a while. It will help [you girls] to win and it will help my children.”13

Her children and Tom, she said, “are worth all the pain and suffering.”14

Dr. Loffler visited the same day. Her thin body “barely dented the mattress”15 as he took her blood, drawing it from “arms scarcely thicker than fingers.”16 Catherine was so weak these days she did not wear her glasses anymore, but the watch Tom had given her still encircled her wrist, on the tightest fastening they could find. Whereas once she had dressed smartly in her polka-dot dress for such gatherings, now she wore a starched white cotton nightgown, embroidered with two crucifixes on the pointed collar.

When Dr. Loffler weighed her, Catherine knew at once that he would not overrule the veto Dunn had put on her attending tomorrow’s hearing. Catherine Donohue now weighed sixty-one pounds; she was not much heavier than her five-year-old son. In truth, even if she had been well enough to attend, it would have been almost impossible for them to transport her. She could not bear the slightest pressure on her body anymore.

Although Catherine was unable to attend the appeal hearing, she trusted Grossman implicitly to represent her interests. “He is just about the best there is, isn’t he?”17 she said of him. And Grossman was not alone in standing up for her: Pearl, Charlotte, Marie, Olive, and the other women were there; and so was Tom Donohue. The hearing was held before a “capacity crowd”18 on a Monday afternoon. Having seen Catherine’s condition the day before, Grossman now declared the case was a “race with death.”19 “If Mrs. Donohue dies before a final ruling,” he said solemnly, “her estate under the law would receive nothing.”20

Perhaps that was why Magid immediately requested a postponement; but it was not granted. Presumably on Catherine’s request, Grossman suggested that a bedside hearing be held so she could be present, but this was vigorously contested by the firm. In the end, the judge determined that he would hear the appeal evidence that very afternoon.

The gathered media were speculative about what grounds Radium Dial might have for an appeal. One of the company’s arguments was that the IIC was without jurisdiction, but this was immediately dismissed. Another was the statute of limitations (again); and a third argument was something completely different.

For Radium Dial now contested the girls’ claims altogether: the firm alleged they were lying. As sworn evidence, Radium Dial submitted to the court a formal statement from one Mr. Reed, the girls’ former boss.

In it, Reed swore “he never told anyone, nor ever heard anyone tell, Catherine Donohue or other employees radium wouldn’t hurt them.”21 He also swore “he was not on the company payroll during the time Catherine was exposed”22 to radium. His wife, Mercedes Reed, also submitted a signed stipulation. Both she and her husband said they “would testify that neither of them gave, nor did anyone else in their hearing give, any orders or instructions to Catherine Donohue to insert in [her] mouth the brushes used.”23

The girls were stunned. The Reeds were the ones who were lying! Why, you only had to look up their name in the town directory through all the years Catherine was employed there to find Mr. Reed’s name next to that of Radium Dial; the company and the man were synonymous. How could he claim he was not working there? And as for swearing that nobody told the girls radium wouldn’t hurt them—unfortunately for the company, a full-page ad signed by its president and printed in several editions of the local newspaper asserted exactly that.

In response to the Reeds’ sworn statements, all the women present that day declared they would testify to the direct opposite. During the hearing, Charlotte and Al Purcell both gave evidence to that effect. Tom Donohue was also on the stand, but this quiet man appears to have been overcome by the occasion; no doubt he was also handicapped by worry for his wife. He “stumbled in his testimony, his voice being scarcely audible, and so the commissioner ruled out [almost] all of his testimony.”24

The so-called evidence of the Reeds was the sole item submitted by the company in its appeal. And so, at 3:30 p.m., the hearing was closed. A five-man committee would judge the final verdict; they promised a decision by July 10.

Catherine just needed to hang on a little bit longer.