The list went on and on. Slowly, methodically, Katherine supplied him with as many names as she could recall: those girls she knew were ill or had died, as well as those who weren’t yet sick. She recalled some fifty former co-workers, whose names she gave to Martland.
In the years to come, the doctor was said to retrieve the list from his files whenever he heard of the death of a dial-painter. With chilling prescience, he would find her name on the list, written there back in the summer of 1925, and meticulously write a neat red D beside the woman’s name.
D is for Death.
Katherine was at that time in fair health. But as her formal diagnosis sank in, she found that she could not stop thinking about that prediction. D is for Death. She had already been made nervous by Irene’s passing; now, every ache became a symptom that could lead to her own sudden death. ‘I know I am going to die,’ she said. She stressed it, trying it on for size: ‘Die. DIE. It doesn’t seem right.’ When she looked in the mirror these days, it wasn’t the same Katherine who stared back at her anymore. ‘Her face, once usually pretty,’ a newspaper wrote of her at this time, ‘is now pinched and drawn with suffering. The suspense and worry have undermined her spirit.’
That was the thing. The worry. It put her ‘in a very precarious mental condition’. Her former company, keeping tabs on her, put it more harshly – they called her ‘mentally deranged’.
‘When you’re sick and can’t get around much,’ Katherine herself said, ‘things are different. Your friends aren’t the same to you. They’re nice to you and all that, but you’re not one of them. I get so discouraged sometimes that I wish . . . well, I don’t wish pleasant things.’
She became ‘very badly ill’ and consulted a nerve specialist countless times. But Dr Beling couldn’t stop her spiral of thoughts, nor halt that flickering cine-reel of ghost girls still playing in her head. Katherine had always been lively and sociable before, but now, her sister said, ‘She is not the same girl at all. She has completely changed in temperament.’
Katherine’s periods stopped; she couldn’t eat; her features themselves seemed almost to change, with her eyes becoming larger and more bug-like, as though sticking out on stalks. That was what happened when you stared your own death in the face. She murmured: ‘Night and rainy days are the worst times.’
Before the year was out, Katherine Schaub would be confined in a hospital for nervous disorders. It was little wonder, given the trauma she could see her friends enduring; the surprise was that more dial-painters weren’t similarly afflicted.
These days visitors to Marguerite Carlough in St Mary’s Hospital found her much the same. Her blood was almost white and her blood count only 20 per cent. But it was her head, her face . . . her X-rays now showed that the radium had eaten away her lower jaw ‘to a mere stump’. Just as he’d experienced with Mollie Maggia, Knef found himself helpless to stop the rot.
Another patient at St Mary’s that August of 1925 was Albina Maggia Larice – but for much happier reasons. Her stomach bloomed with pregnancy; her cheeks flushed with pride. For nearly four years she and James had been trying for a child. Each month that had passed without the good news she yearned for had left a bitter taste in her mouth, as her body betrayed her time and again. Next month, she would tell herself . . . but then next month had always brought the same acidic disappointment.
Not anymore. At long last, Albina thought contentedly, rubbing a loving hand across her swollen belly, she was becoming a mother – she would cradle her child in her arms, tuck it into bed at night, keep it safe from harm . . .
When the pains had started, she’d made her way to St Mary’s. Albina was clutching her stomach, trying to stop from crying out. It was strange but, somehow, even though she didn’t know how this was supposed to feel – somehow, in some way, something felt wrong. It just felt wrong.
The doctors put her in a room, laid her down on a bed. She pushed and pushed when they told her to. She felt the baby move through her, felt it as her baby came. Her son. She felt him, but Albina never heard him cry.
Her baby was born dead.
21
Albina Larice didn’t suffer from the same aching pains as her sister Quinta: the arthritic hips, the loose teeth. She’d once had a rheumatic knee, shortly before she’d married James, but, she said, ‘I got rid of that; it never bothered me anymore.’ Yet just two weeks after her baby was stillborn at St Mary’s, as though her body was breaking to match her heart, severe pain appeared in her limbs and her left leg began to shorten. In October 1925, as her family doctor’s treatment had brought no relief, Albina consulted Dr Humphries at the Orthopaedic Hospital. It was there, as she overheard the doctors talking about her, that she heard one of them remark that she was a radium case.
It was shock after shock, trouble after trouble. ‘I am,’ Albina later said, ‘so unhappy.’
As the doctors had done with Quinta, they encased her in plaster for four months, hoping it would help her improve. But Albina didn’t feel any benefit. ‘I know,’ she murmured dejectedly, ‘I’m getting weaker, weaker, weaker . . .’
Along the corridor from her in the hospital was another former dial-painter. Edna Hussman, the Dresden Doll as was, had been seeing doctors since September 1925, apparently for rheumatism; when their treatments didn’t help, she’d sought out Humphries.
Her trouble had begun back in July. ‘I first started,’ she later said, ‘with these here pains in my hip. When I would be walking, I would get these sharp pains, and I would stumble. [It happened] nearly every time I would walk. I just limped along, held on to different things around the house to get around; that is the only way I could get around.’
Humphries, who noted that Edna’s left leg was an inch shorter than her right, took an X-ray. Edna had walked to the hospital with the help of her husband, Louis, so he didn’t think she could be too badly hurt. But when he assessed the picture, he had to think again: her leg was broken. She’d broken her leg when she stumbled yet, since the stumble was a slight stumble and not a fall, she had not realised she was so badly injured.
Humphries remembered of Edna’s case: ‘She had a spontaneous fracture of the neck of the femur [thigh bone] – and that doesn’t occur in young people as a rule. I have never seen a young woman with [such] a fracture occurring spontaneously.’
Never – until now.