‘He said it would make me sick.’
Her answers were concise and informative. She and Berry had an instant repartee, with question and answer flicking back and forth slickly, just as they had planned. Yet Berry gave her room, too, to describe her suffering, so that everyone could hear what the company had done.
‘I have had my jaws curetted seventeen times,’ said Grace simply, ‘with pieces of the jawbone removed. Most of my teeth have been removed. [My] spine [is] decaying and one bone in [my] foot [is] totally destroyed.’
It was horrifying to listen to; many in the courtroom were in tears. No wonder, when Markley made some smart comment, the judge snapped back at him. ‘If I find you guilty, I think you will be sorry,’ he said tartly.
Given the warning, Markley approached Grace’s cross-examination with some caution. He could doubtless see, too, that she was not going to be a pushover. And she certainly was not.
Critical to the USRC lawyers’ arguments, particularly in this Court of Chancery, was the statute of limitations and what the girls knew when. If they’d had information prior to July 1925 that their work had made them sick, they should have brought a lawsuit at that time. So Markley tried to push Grace into saying that she had known her work was to blame earlier.
‘Did [your dentist] tell you he thought it was your work that was affecting you?’ the lawyer asked as he stalked around the court.
‘No, sir.’
The question was repeated.
‘Why no,’ said Grace smartly. ‘I was working for the Fidelity Union Trust Company when I saw him.’
They also quizzed her on all the different lawyers she had seen. And when they came to Berry, they asked her, ‘[Was he] the first one you had?’
‘No, not the first one,’ Grace replied, locking eyes with her young lawyer. ‘The only one that ever brought suit.’
Katherine Schaub watched proceedings eagerly. ‘Everything was going along splendidly, I thought,’ she later wrote. She watched Quinta limp to the stand; the judge, Katherine was gratified to note, was immediately concerned. ‘I notice you are very lame,’ Backes said to Quinta, before Berry had asked a single question. ‘What is the trouble?’
‘Trouble with my hip – both hips in fact,’ Quinta replied. ‘As to my ankles, I cannot wear a shoe very long; I [have] terrible pains in my knees, one arm and shoulder.’
Katherine listened attentively. ‘Tomorrow there would be another court, and the day after, still another,’ she wrote, ‘and so on until the entire case was heard. And then – the court would give its verdict. Then perhaps I could get away from everything and forget.’ Still half-listening to Quinta, she started to picture her life afterwards, how happy she hoped she would be. Just a few more days of these January hearings, she thought, and then it would all be over – one way or the other.
But it was not to be. ‘I was awakened from my dreaming,’ she later said, ‘by the sound of the vice chancellor’s gavel hitting the desk. The vice chancellor was speaking. The next court day, he said, would be April 25. I could have given way to tears, but tears would not do any good, I knew.
‘I must summon all the courage I had – and fight.’
Though the delay was galling, the time, in the end, passed quickly. Berry, who was concerned that little was being done for the girls medically, persuaded some New York doctors to admit the women to hospital and all five spent a month in their care. The physicians believed there might be some treatment devised that would eliminate the radium in the girls’ bones.
‘A Russian doctor,’ Grace recalled, ‘thought he could help us with some sort of lead treatment [a treatment used in lead-poisoning cases], but it didn’t seem to take the radium out of our systems. I guess nothing ever will.’ Perhaps grasping the hopelessness of her situation, Grace summoned Berry and formally drafted her will, even though she didn’t have much to leave to her family.
Despite the failure of the treatment, many of the girls remained positive. ‘I face the inevitable unflinchingly,’ said Quinta. ‘What else can I do? I don’t know when I will die. I try not to think of the death that is creeping closer, all the time.’ Death seemed further from Quinta than some of the others, though, as her condition was progressing more slowly than, for example, Albina’s; consequently, it was her habit ‘to turn aside pity for herself by commiserating her sister’s plight’.
Many of the women found just being out of Newark in the quiet calm of a hospital made a big difference to their outlook. ‘I haven’t had anything yet but a bath,’ Katherine wrote when they first arrived. ‘I enjoyed that because someone helped me to take it. A maid is a fine thing to have when you are sick.’
There was one other bonus to being in New York. As Katherine wrote, they were at last ‘safe from intrusion [and] safe from the prying eyes of unwelcome advisers’.
For the omnipresent unwelcome adviser, Dr Flinn, had not stopped trying to get to them, even though Berry had found him out. Flinn had recently told – and convinced – Dr Humphries that he was ‘really a friend of the girls’. But the women, now knowing Flinn was a company man, had gone straight to Berry when they’d heard of this; they mistrusted Flinn’s ‘clandestine overtures’ and at their request Berry wrote to Flinn to ask him to desist in what the girls considered harassment. Flinn replied that he thought Berry ‘impudent’ and concluded, ‘The other inaccuracies of your letter I will not take the time to answer.’
The women could not avoid Flinn, however, when on 22 April, three days before the trial was to resume, they were summoned to a compulsory examination by the company doctors. Flinn, as well as other specialists, including Dr Herman Schlundt (who was a ‘very close personal friend’ of Vice President Barker), conducted the tests.
Grace flinched as they pricked her with a needle to take her blood. She was constantly afraid of anything that might result in cuts or bruises, for her skin no longer healed. Some dial-painters had ‘paper-thin skin that literally would split open if simply brushed by a fingernail’. A week later, Grace realised she had been right to worry: in the place where the doctors had pricked her, the flesh surrounding the puncture mark was black.
During the examination radioactivity tests were conducted, the equipment deliberately positioned ‘so that the table itself was between large portions of the patient’s body and the instrument’. Flinn also ‘held the instrument two to three feet from the subject, allowing the radiation to dissipate before reaching the device’. Unsurprisingly, the company’s verdict was that none of the women was radioactive.
But the girls’ case was not finished yet. In three days’ time they were back on the stand for the fight of their lives.
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