But it was, of course, the dial-painters themselves for whom the biggest difference was made. Soon after Sarah passed away, Martland carried his testing equipment back into St Mary’s. It was Marguerite Carlough’s turn to be measured for the radium that the doctor believed was lurking in her bones.
She was in ‘a terrible condition’ on the day he ran the tests, with her mouth, as it had always been, the thing that was most agonising. The alpha rays of the radium, Martland now believed, were slowly drilling those holes into her jawbone. Despite the pain, Marguerite put the breathing tube into her mouth and blew. Just like her sister had done before her, she breathed, as steadily as she possibly could. In . . . out. On the day Martland ran her tests, the normal leak was 8.5 subdivisions in 50 minutes. (The normal number changed depending on the humidity and other factors.) When he checked Marguerite’s results, they showed 99.7 subdivisions in the same time.
At least, she thought, it would help her legal case.
She had more reason than ever to want to win now: following her sister’s death, the Carloughs had added Sarah’s claim to the litigation. USRC was now fighting three cases: for Marguerite, Hazel and Sarah. Marguerite was the only one of those three left alive. And so she wanted to do everything she could to help the case; not only for herself, but for her sister. That was something to live for, to strive for, to battle through the pain for. While she was in St Mary’s, her lawyer, Isidor Kalitsch of Kalitsch & Kalitsch, interviewed her even as she lay in bed, taking her formal testimony so that – whatever happened – he had it to fight the girls’ case.
Yet Hazel, Sarah and Marguerite weren’t the only girls afflicted. That was something Martland knew – but what he didn’t know was how to contact the others, to get more girls to come forward. Some were ultimately connected to him by their dentists and physicians, but others came to him via a young woman by the name of Katherine Wiley.
‘In the midst of my difficulties in the summer of 1925,’ Katherine Schaub later recalled, ‘Miss Wiley again called at our home. This time, she was interested in my own case, for she had heard that I had been ill. [She] suggested that I consult the county medical examiner for a diagnosis.’
Katherine had been troubled by her ailments for a long time by that stage. She had seen what had happened to Irene; she had read what had happened to Sarah. She wasn’t stupid. She knew why Miss Wiley had called on her, and what Dr Martland thought he would find. To her sister Josephine, she said slowly, ‘It must be that I have radium poisoning.’
She tried it out in her mind, like slipping on a new dress. It clung to her, skin-tight: nowhere to hide. It felt most peculiar; not least because Katherine was doing well that summer. She did not appear ill anymore. Her jaw wasn’t troubling her; all the infections in her mouth had cleared up. Her stomach, following her operation, was much improved. ‘Her general physique was good.’ She couldn’t have what the others had, she couldn’t; for they had all died, and here she was, still living. Yet there was only one way to be sure. There was only one way to know. Katherine Schaub duly made an appointment with the county physician.
She wasn’t the only one. Quinta McDonald had become increasingly concerned about her own condition of late: her teeth, which she had once considered her best feature, had started loosening in her mouth and then falling out spontaneously, straight into her hand. Ironically, her daughter Helen was losing her milk teeth at the same time. ‘I can stand the pain,’ Quinta later said, ‘but I do hate to lose my teeth. The upper ones are so loose they merely hang.’
Following her new trouble, Quinta had started consulting Dr Knef, the kind dentist who had treated her sister Mollie. Knef had been working with Martland to treat Marguerite; so it was Knef who arranged for Quinta to have Martland’s special tests. And with her came her old friend Grace Fryer, who now had no jaw trouble at all, who was apparently in good health – but whose back hurt worse with every passing day.
One by one they came. Katherine. Quinta. Grace. They weren’t ill like Sarah, or Marguerite, or Dr Leman. They weren’t at death’s door. They stayed still as Martland scanned their bodies with his electrometer; asked them to breathe into a tube; tested them for the tell-tale anaemia that would betray what was happening inside their bones.
To each he said the same. ‘He told me,’ Grace remembered, ‘that my system showed the presence of radioactive substances.’ ‘He told me,’ Quinta said, ‘that my trouble was all due to the presence of [radium].’
He told them that there was no cure.
A deep breath was needed for that news. In . . . out.
‘When I first found out what I had,’ Grace remembered, ‘and learned that it was incurable . . .’ She tailed off, but eventually continued: ‘I was horror-stricken . . . I would look at people I knew and I would say to myself, “Well, I’ll never see you again.”’
They all had that same thought. Quinta, heading home to her children: I’ll never see you again. Katherine, breaking the news to her father: I’ll never see you again.
For Katherine, though, the diagnosis brought relief too. ‘When the doctors [finally] told me that [my tests] showed positive radioactivity,’ she remembered, ‘I was not as frightened as I thought I would be. At least there was no groping in the dark now.’
Instead, there was light. Glowing, glorious light. Shining, stunning light. Light that led their way into the future. ‘The medical examiner’s diagnosis,’ commented Katherine Schaub with characteristic acumen, ‘furnished perfect legal evidence for a lawsuit.’
For too long the women had waited for the truth. The scales, at last, were tipping against the company. The girls had been given a death sentence; yet they had also been given the tools to fight their cause – to fight for justice.
The diagnosis, Katherine Schaub now said, ‘gave me hope’.
PART TWO
Power
20
There was much to be done. Even before the summer was out Dr Martland had lent his voice to Katherine Wiley’s campaign to amend the industrial-compensation law. Yet the legal change was only part of it. For the girls, who now understood how unforgivably careless the company had been with their lives, the real question was how the firm’s executives could have considered them expendable. Why didn’t their basic humanity compel them to end the practice of lip-pointing?
Grace Fryer, for one, was filled with anger as her clever mind raked over what had happened. For she now recalled all too well a fleeting moment in her memory that sealed the company’s guilt.
‘Do not do that,’ Sabin von Sochocky had once said to her. ‘You will get sick.’
Seven years later . . . here she was in Newark City Hospital.