There was one cloud on the horizon though, darkening the newlyweds’ bliss: Mollie. Even though Albina now rarely saw her as the two lived distantly, all of Mollie’s sisters couldn’t help but be concerned by her deteriorating condition. For as the weeks passed, it wasn’t just her mouth that became sore; she started to have aches and pains in completely unconnected places. ‘My sister,’ Quinta remembered, ‘began having trouble with her teeth and her jawbone and her hips and feet. We thought it was rheumatism.’ The doctor administered aspirin and sent her home to Highland Avenue.
At least she lived with an expert. One of the women she boarded with, fifty-year-old Edith Mead, was a trained nurse, and she cared for Mollie as best she could. But nothing in her training could make sense of this disease; she had never seen anything like it. Neither Knef, nor Mollie’s family doctor nor Edith seemed able to make her better. Every appointment brought forth another expensive doctor’s bill, but no matter how much Mollie spent there was no cure.
In fact, the more Knef tried to help – and he employed some ‘extreme methods of treatment’ – the worse Mollie became: the worse her teeth were, and the ulcers, and her gums. Sometimes, Knef didn’t even have to pull her teeth anymore; they fell out on their own. Nothing he did arrested the disintegration in the slightest degree.
And disintegration was the word for it. Mollie’s mouth was literally falling apart. She was in constant agony and only superficial palliatives brought her any relief. For Mollie, a girl who had always loved to joke around, it was unbearable. Her smile, which had once been a toothy grin that beamed across her face, was unrecognisable as more and more of her teeth came out. Well, no matter; she was in too much pain to smile anyway.
As Christmas passed and the New Year began, the doctors finally thought they had diagnosed her mysterious condition. Sores in the mouth . . . joint pain . . . extreme tiredness . . . a young single woman living outside the family home . . . Well, it was obvious, really. On 24 January 1922, her physicians tested her for syphilis, or Cupid’s disease – a sexually transmitted infection.
But the test came back negative. The doctors would have to think again.
By now Dr Knef had noticed certain things about her case that made him doubt his initial diagnosis. It was, it appeared, an ‘extraordinary affliction’; it was almost like something was attacking her from the inside, though he knew not what it could be. As well as the seemingly unstoppable disintegration of her mouth, to his trained nostrils the noticeable smell coming from her seemed ‘peculiar’: ‘it differed decidedly from the odour commonly associated with the usual forms of necrosis of the jaw’. Necrosis meant bone decay. Mollie’s teeth – those that were left – were literally rotting in her mouth.
After conducting further research, Knef reached a conclusion. She was, he determined, suffering from a condition not unlike phosphorus poisoning. It was the same suggestion Katherine Schaub’s doctor had made, when she’d had her outbreak of teenage spots a few years before.
‘Phossy jaw’ – as the victims of phosphorus poisoning had grimly nicknamed the condition – had very similar symptoms to those that Mollie was enduring: tooth loss, gum inflammation, necrosis and pain. And so, at her next appointment, Knef asked Mollie how she was employed.
‘Painting numbers on watches so that they will shine at night,’ she responded, wincing as her tongue formed the words and touched the ulcers in her mouth.
With that, his suspicions increased. Knef decided to take matters into his own hands. He visited the radium plant – but received little cooperation. ‘I asked the radium people for the formula of their compound,’ he remembered, ‘but this was refused.’ Undark was, after all, a highly lucrative commercial property; the company couldn’t share the top-secret formula with just anyone. Knef was, however, told that no phosphorus was used and assured that work in the factory could not have caused the disease.
His own tests seemed to back up the firm’s assertion. ‘I thought phosphorus might have been in the paint and caused her trouble,’ he later said, ‘but all the tests I made failed to show it.’ They were, it seemed, still in the dark.
None of this helped Mollie. By now, the pain was excruciating. Her mouth had become a mass of sores; she could barely speak at all, let alone eat. It was horrifying for her sisters to watch. She suffered such agony, said Quinta, that it ‘has unnerved me every time I recall [it]’.
Anyone who has ever endured an abscessed tooth may be able to imagine some small degree of her suffering. By now, Mollie’s entire lower jaw, the roof of her mouth and even the bones of her ears might be said to be one huge abscess. There was no way in the world that she could work in such a condition. She quit her job at the Orange studio, where she had spent so many happy hours painting dials, and was confined to her home. Surely, one day soon, the doctors would determine what was wrong, and cure her, and she could get on with her life again.
But no cure came. In May, Knef suggested that she come in again to his office, so that he could examine her and see what progress had been made. Mollie limped into his office; the rheumatism in her hips and feet had grown worse, and she was almost lame. But it was her mouth that took up all her thoughts, all her time, and consumed her. There was no escape from the agony.
She hobbled over to Dr Knef’s dental chair and then leaned back. Gingerly she opened her mouth for him. He bent over her and prepared to probe inside.
There were barely any teeth left now, he saw; red-raw ulcers peppered the inside of her mouth instead. Mollie tried to indicate that her jaw was hurting especially, and Knef prodded delicately at the bone in her mouth.
To his horror and shock, even though his touch had been gentle, her jawbone broke against his fingers. He then removed it, ‘not by an operation, but merely by putting his fingers in her mouth and lifting it out’.
A week or so later, her entire lower jaw was removed in the same way.
Mollie couldn’t bear it – but there was no relief. All the doctors could offer were analgesic drugs that barely helped. Her whole face beneath her bouffant brown hair was just pain, pain, pain. She became anaemic, weakening further. Knef, even though he wasn’t a physician (nor proficient at the procedure), tested her for syphilis again on 20 June – and this time the results came back positive.