‘Wall Street,’ wrote one witness to the crash that day, ‘was a street of vanished hopes, of curiously silent apprehension and of a sort of paralysed hypnosis.’
More than a hundred blocks north of where America’s economy was imploding, Quinta McDonald lay in her room at the New York Memorial Hospital. Here, too, was silent apprehension and paralysis – but never, Quinta promised herself, never would her hope be gone.
She had been admitted in September ‘in a dying condition’, but a month on she was still fighting – and how. It was incredible for her friends and family to witness. ‘She was a Spartan,’ said her sister-in-law Ethel, who was caring for the McDonald children while their mother was in hospital. ‘She always said “pretty good” when I asked her how she was. Never did she think she was going to die.’
‘Her one thought was to live for the children,’ commented Quinta’s husband, James. ‘The thought of them lent her courage to fight for her life.’
The McDonalds were now reconciled, yet the past year had been turbulent. Although James had been awarded $400 ($5,544) in the 1928 settlement, that sum was dwarfed by his wife’s new wealth – and it seems the difference had rankled. Then unemployed, James had spent his money in speakeasies over the summer, while Quinta had invested hers in a trust fund for the children. One night in September 1928, his resentment had come to a head. When Quinta refused his demands for money, James had viciously struck his crippled wife and threatened to gas her to death, turning on every gas jet in the house as she lay helpless in her plaster casts. He was arrested. Quinta, however, did not press charges; it was not the first time she’d been hit. She did begin divorce proceedings, with Berry’s help, but it seems James later won her round and they were eventually dropped. ‘My husband tries to be brave,’ she’d said of him once. ‘But it’s harder on men than women.’
Now, in the fall of 1929, it was Quinta who had to be brave. ‘For the past three weeks,’ Ethel said in early November, ‘she could not move. She had to be fed with a spoon.’ But in a turnaround that amazed doctors, Quinta now began winning her desperate fight.
She might have been inspired in her recovery by Grace and Albina, who were both doing well. When Grace visited Quinta in hospital one evening, she granted the reporters waiting outside a brief interview, revealing proudly that she no longer always wore her back brace. ‘Doctors told me I had great resistance to disease and that’s why I got along so well,’ she told them, and then added jokingly: ‘I had resistance enough to get up and vote for Hoover when I was supposed to be sick in bed!’
Quinta, too, hoped to be up again before too long – or at least well enough to go home. She improved rapidly; so much so that James got the house ready for her return, and the family celebrated Thanksgiving and their daughter Helen’s tenth birthday with the cheering thought of her homecoming uppermost in their minds.
‘Each time we [saw her] during the last several weeks,’ Grace enthused, ‘she has been stronger. And today she was her old self again. It’s been a long time since she has been so well.’ Quinta asked Grace to buy Christmas gifts for the children on her behalf; she was determined to make it a holiday season they would never forget.
By 6 December, Quinta was almost perky. James visited her on that Friday evening and they chatted about Christmas; they hoped she would be home to enjoy the festivities with the family. Midway through their conversation, she suddenly sighed.
‘I’m tired,’ she remarked.
James was not surprised. He bent to give her a kiss, careful not to touch her leg. She had a swelling of some size at the top of her thigh, and it gave her a lot of pain. They both glanced at the clock on the ward; it was not quite the closing hour for visitors.
‘Would you mind leaving a little early?’ she asked.
He did as she requested, departing with no sense of foreboding.
That swelling on Quinta’s leg . . . Had Martland seen it, he might have recognised it. For it was a sarcoma – the kind of bone tumour that had killed Ella Eckert on a cold December day almost two years ago.
Just before 2 p.m. on 7 December 1929, Quinta McDonald sank into a coma. The hospital telephoned James and he left home immediately, driving as fast as he could; he was stopped twice for breaking the speed limit, but the police let him go after they learned his mission.
His efforts were all in vain. When James arrived at the Memorial Hospital, ‘tears streaming down his face’, he was a few minutes too late. Quinta McDonald was dead. He oscillated between rage and depression before settling on simple grief.
‘I am heartbroken,’ he later said. He added quietly, ‘I am glad she has found peace.’
Her friends were devastated. They had become a tight-knit unit: the five of them against the company; against the world. Quinta was the first of them to fall. Albina collapsed when she heard the news; Katherine Schaub was greatly shaken too. Katherine chose not to attend the funeral, but returned to her country home ‘to find forgetfulness and to continue [her] studies’. She was taking an English correspondence course at Columbia University; she planned to write a book about her experiences. ‘For a time,’ she said, ‘I succeeded in losing myself entirely in my writing.’
For the girls remaining in Orange, there was no such forgetfulness. In a way, they wanted to remember: to remember Quinta. On Tuesday 10 December, Edna, Albina and Grace arrived at St Venantius Church for her funeral. The variance in their fortunes was clear for the waiting reporters to see: Grace ‘walked briskly and unaided’, while Edna ‘seemed to be the most affected by the disease’. For Albina, this was the second sister she had lost to radium poisoning and even to attend was a struggle. Yet she was determined to pay her respects. There was a long flight of stairs leading to the church door, but Albina fought her way up every single step, even though she was ‘apparently near collapse’. This was more important than her comfort. This was for Quinta.
It was a brief service. Helen and Robert, the McDonald children, ‘kept close to their father, both too young to realise their loss, yet sensing’. In the weeks to come, they would indeed have a Christmas they would never forget.