35
Orange, New Jersey
1929
Katherine Schaub rebuttoned her blouse after her medical examination and waited for Dr Craver to speak; he’d said he had something important he wished to discuss. To her astonishment, he proposed that the radium company should stop paying her medical bills; in the settlement they had agreed to cover them for life. He wanted her, instead, to accept a one-off lump sum.
Less than a year after the New Jersey settlement had been reached, the United States Radium Corporation was attempting to renege on its agreement.
The idea of paying a lump sum originated with Vice President Barker, but it had the full support of the company doctors. Dr Ewing deemed the current arrangements ‘unsatisfactory’ as ‘these women are not going to die’. In his lab, Craver now used to Katherine ‘the potent argument about the bankruptcy of the company’ to induce her to accept – but USRC was not bankrupt; anything but. Such an untruth, Berry later said when Katherine told him anxiously of the doctor’s scheme, was ‘purely a “painted devil” to compel a settlement’.
Finding the women still alive one year on seems to have been a financial irritation to the firm, for the women, crippled and in pain, were regularly consulting doctors and buying palliative medicines. From USRC’s perspective, it was too much; they quibbled every bill. The girls, Ewing warned threateningly, should be ‘cautious about assuming that every expense they incur will be paid’.
The board of doctors had been expected to announce that the women were not suffering from radium poisoning, thus freeing the company from its responsibilities. It seemed that Ewing, whom Berry described as having a ‘hostile attitude’, certainly longed for that diagnosis. But to Ewing’s frustration, even though the board kept subjecting the women to test after test, they found each one duplicated the previous results.
Berry wanted the board to issue a formal statement that the girls had radium poisoning: it would be firm evidence that dial-painters as a group were afflicted by it, which Berry and others could then use in the upcoming lawsuits for the girls’ friends. But Ewing refused. ‘We are quite unwilling to have these findings used in connection with any other case,’ he wrote primly.
As for the girls themselves, they were just doing their best to get through it all. They were subjected to a harrowing array of experimental treatments and tests. The physicians tried Epsom salts that made them sick, colonic irrigations and week-long assessments on their spines and excreta. The exams were usually conducted at Ewing and Craver’s hospital, which meant the crippled women had to travel to New York. Louis Hussman told Berry that ‘it is very difficult for Edna to go so far without injury to her; the last time she went to New York she had to go to her bed as a result’.
Edna’s beautiful blonde hair, by now, had become snow-white. All the girls looked far older than they were, with faces that had curiously slack skin around their chins, where their jawbones had been removed. Only Grace seemed better than she had the year before. Although she had now had twenty-five operations on her jaw, they had failed to break her habit of smiling; she was said to be the happiest of the five by far. When she’d received the settlement, she’d said with determination, ‘People are now asking me if I am going to stop working: I do not intend to do anything of the kind. I’m going to keep right on at my job as long as I can, because I like it.’ She still commuted daily, with the bank being understanding about the time off she needed for her tests.
Though the tests happened often, the girls never learned the results. ‘The doctors don’t seem to tell [me] anything,’ complained Katherine. ‘I would like to know if I am getting any better.’ In fact, in many ways, Katherine was better, for she now lived quietly in a rural convalescent home set on a hilltop, twelve miles out of Newark, which she called ‘the jewel of the east’. She wrote that the setting inspired her to get well so she could enjoy ‘hollyhocks and rambler roses and peonies and sunshine’. The money had helped Albina too; she was described as being ‘the picture of contentment’ that summer. Her pleasures were now her radio, goldfish, the movies and short jaunts in the country, often with Quinta.
At the present time, however, Quinta had been admitted to hospital; she was unable to sit up and only family visitors were allowed. It not only meant that she wasn’t available for jaunts to the country; she was also unable to attend court on behalf of Mae Canfield, as the other four women did in the summer of 1929. Quinta did, however, ask Berry to represent her.
It was a preliminary hearing. As he worked on Mae’s case, Berry was fast coming to appreciate the sheer canniness of the radium firm in settling the year before. The second time around, it was even harder for him to build a case; the Drinkers, Kjaer and Martland all refused to testify, and there were no champions in the press hounding the firm into submission.
The five girls were helping Mae by waiving their right to patient confidentiality; they wanted the committee of doctors to use their cases to prove that radium poisoning existed. But not only did Markley object to any reference to the five girls – both their medical diagnoses and even the fact of last year’s settlement – by saying that they were ‘in no way connected to this case’, the company-appointed doctors also declined to give evidence.
Yet as Katherine had once written, it would be difficult to find another like Raymond Berry. He summoned Craver and Ewing to the hearing regardless; they were ‘furious’. Even though Ewing witnessed the women swearing under oath that they were happy for him to discuss their cases, he refused on the grounds of patient confidentiality.
Dr Krumbhaar, the girls’ ally on the board, was happy to give evidence. And even though Markley threatened to sue him if he did, Berry persuaded the doctor to continue. The lawyer’s skill both in handling witnesses and in presenting his case was growing; he now had all the data and experience to make life very difficult indeed for the United States Radium Corporation: he was a most uncomfortable thorn in its side. The executives had assumed that when they settled the first five cases, Berry would be off their backs. They now realised they had been very much mistaken.
Black Tuesday, they called it – 29 October 1929, the day a financial nightmare rocked Wall Street and ‘paper fortunes melted away like frost under a hot sun’.