That summer, however, Quinta was caught up in all things family, and had no time to give the situation much more thought than that. On 25 July, she gave birth to her second child, Robert. ‘We were all so darned happy together,’ she remembered of that time. She and her husband James now had the perfect family: a little boy and a little girl. The kids’ Aunt Albina, who was still waiting for the blessing of her first child, doted on them both.
During her pregnancy, like many women Quinta had suffered swollen ankles. Although Helen’s birth had been relatively easy, she’d struggled with Robert; it was a difficult labour and forceps had been used. After his birth, she’d assumed she’d get well but instead developed a bad back; and her ankles still bothered her. ‘I hobbled around,’ she later recalled; she treated the problem with household remedies. And then: ‘I went to bed one night,’ she remembered, ‘[and] woke up in the morning with terrible pains in my bones.’ She called out a local doctor and he began treating her for rheumatism. His call-out fee was $3 ($40) a pop, and she and James could have done without the additional expense given the new baby, but she just couldn’t seem to shake the pains.
By the end of the year, she would have seen the doctor eighty-two times.
As the summer of 1923 drew to a close, Katherine Schaub’s complaint from the middle of July was finally investigated by Lenore Young, an Orange health officer. She looked up the dead girls’ records – and found that Mollie Maggia had died of syphilis and Helen Quinlan of Vincent’s angina.
‘I tried to get in touch with Viedt,’ she added, ‘but he was out of town.’ And so she did nothing. ‘I let the matter drop. [It] has been neglected . . . but not out of my mind entirely.’
Had the dial-painters been privy to her correspondence, those words would have been cold comfort indeed to those continuing to suffer, including Hazel Vincent. Hazel was still being treated for pyorrhea and still having teeth extracted; her teeth old friends dying off, one by one, until her own mouth felt like a stranger. By now she could no longer work as the pain was unbearable.
For her friends and family, it was intolerable to watch. For Theo in particular, who had loved her since they were teenagers, he felt like he was feeling his future disintegrate in his arms. He begged her to let him pay for the doctors and the dentists that she went to, but she was unwilling to accept money from him.
He wasn’t going to stand for that. This was the woman he loved. If she wouldn’t accept help from him as her boyfriend – would she accept it if she was his wife? And so, even though Hazel was very ill, he married her, because he believed that if she was his wife he would be more able to take care of her. They stood before the altar together and he promised to love her, in sickness and in health . . .
The new bride wasn’t the only radium girl suffering that fall. In October 1923, Marguerite Carlough, who was still working in the studio, developed a severe toothache that made her face swell up. And then, in November, another young woman fell ill.
‘I began to have trouble with my teeth,’ wrote Katherine Schaub.
Katherine had seen at first-hand what Irene went through. When her mouth started to ache, it must have shot a bolt of terror right through her. She was brave; she didn’t ignore it. Instead, on 17 November, she went to the same dentist who had treated Irene, to see if he could help her where all his efforts had failed for her cousin. Dr Barry removed two of her teeth; he noticed, as he examined them, that they were ‘flinty’ and broke easily. He added in her file: ‘Patient has been employed in radium works in Orange, same place as Miss Rudolph . . .’ Katherine was told to come back soon.
And she did – again and again. Following the tooth extraction, her gum failed to heal and she returned very frequently to Dr Barry’s office: five times within that same month, at a charge of $2 ($27) each visit; the extraction had cost $8 ($111). Katherine wasn’t stupid: ‘I kept thinking about Irene,’ she said anxiously, ‘and about the trouble she had had with her jaw . . . there was some relationship between Irene’s case and mine.’ She also realised: ‘[Irene] had necrosis . . . she died.’
Katherine’s always-vivid imagination, now fuelled by the knowledge of what she had seen Irene suffer, soon became a constant, flickering cine-feel, silently playing out what must lie before her, over and over. She was ‘seriously shocked’ and a severe nervousness developed which affected her mental health; a situation that did not improve when, on 16 December 1923, Catherine O’Donnell, another former co-worker, passed away. The doctors said she died of pneumonia and gangrene of lung, but Katherine didn’t know for sure. And so Catherine became another ghost girl to haunt her in her head. She was buried in the same cemetery where, six months earlier, Irene had been laid to rest.
So many girls were ailing. As Christmas approached, Grace Fryer was conscious that although her jaw seemed to be getting better, the pain in her back and foot had become worse. ‘My foot was stiff; I couldn’t bend it,’ she remembered. ‘[When] I walked I had to walk with my foot real flat.’ Yet she’d soldiered on throughout the fall and didn’t ask for help. ‘I said nothing about [my condition] to anyone.’
But she couldn’t pull the wool over her parents’ eyes. Daniel and Grace Fryer watched their eldest daughter as she went about her life – commuting to the bank, helping out at home, playing with her young nieces and nephews – and they saw that her gait, which had always been confident and unhindered, had changed. She was limping, despite herself. They couldn’t let this go on.
‘Towards the end of 1923,’ their daughter Grace conceded, ‘my condition became noticeable, and my parents insisted that I see a doctor.’ Dutifully, she made an appointment at the Orthopaedic Hospital in Orange for 5 January 1924.
Before that was Christmas. By Christmas Eve 1923, Marguerite Carlough felt at her wits’ end. All fall she’d struggled on, continuing her work at the studio in spite of increasing ill health. Lip-pointing had been stopped in late 1923; Josephine Smith, the forelady, revealed: ‘When [the company] warning was given about pointing brushes in [our] mouths, it was explained to the girls [that] this was because the acid in the mouth spoiled the adhesive.’
Marguerite had followed the new orders. Her mind wasn’t on the job, though; she couldn’t concentrate as she’d used to. She had extreme fatigue, was pale and weak, and her toothache, which had started in October, was driving her insane. Unable to eat, the weight had dropped off her at an alarming rate; the smart tailored clothes she favoured were now hanging off her frame, no longer made to fit her newly scrawny figure.
When she left work that 24 December, she didn’t know it, but it would be for the very last time. Because, that same evening, she visited her dentist. There were two teeth that were especially hurting her, and her dentist advised that both should be removed that same day. Marguerite consented to the extraction.