Their lawyer was a man named O’Meara. A single hearing was held in 1930, but nothing ever came of it; perhaps O’Meara ran into the same trouble as George Weeks. ‘He couldn’t do nothing for us,’ remembered Jane Looney.
Jean added: ‘My dad said at the end, “You can’t beat them. There’s no sense in trying. It’s not worth going through this kind of mess.”’
‘Just forget it,’ he’d say bitterly. ‘We won’t go any further.’
There was nothing they could do.
There was nothing the doctors could do, either, for Mary Vicini Tonielli. She had quit Radium Dial when she became sick; she had sciatica, she thought, but when she prodded gingerly at her back, she realised she had some kind of lump on her spine.
‘The doctor said it was a sarcoma,’ Mary’s brother Alphonse later recalled.
Mary had had an operation on it in the fall of 1929. But sixteen weeks on, she was no better. In fact, Alphonse revealed, ‘She suffered like a dog for four months. There was never any more peace for her.’
On 22 February 1930, Mary Tonielli died; she was twenty-one. Her husband of less than two years, Joseph, buried her in the Ottawa Avenue Cemetery.
‘We thought it was radium poisoning,’ said Alphonse bleakly. ‘But her husband and the old people didn’t investigate. They felt so bad about her death.’
37
Orange, New Jersey
1930
Katherine Schaub placed her cane gingerly on the low step in front of her; she could now walk only with the aid of a cane or crutches. She had been forced to return to Newark: having spent large sums trying to regain her health, she was now entirely dependent on her $600 ($8,515) annuity, but it didn’t provide enough money for a rural residence. She hated being back in the city, where she felt her health declined.
She started up the low step, but slipped and came down hard upon her knee. It would have been painful for anyone, but Katherine was a radium girl: her bones were as fragile as china. She felt the bone fracture, but when Dr Humphries examined her X-rays, he had worse news to tell her than the broken bone.
Katherine Schaub had a sarcoma of the knee.
She was admitted to hospital for ten long weeks, while they treated it with X-rays. It seemed to reduce the swelling, but Katherine was utterly demoralised. Encased in plaster for months, she was eventually told the bone ‘didn’t knit the way it should’ and that, from now on, she would have to wear a metal brace. ‘A lump came into my throat,’ Katherine recalled, ‘as the doctor fastened on my leg the strange contrivance. I cried a little bit, but my faith consoled me.’
Despite the consolation of her faith, however, she found her prognosis profoundly depressing. That old cine-reel from years gone by started up again in her mind, now with an ever-growing cast of ghost girls. Where Katherine had once gained relief from being in the sunshine, now, she said, she was ‘having difficulty with the light and sun up here on the roof’. ‘My head,’ she stammered, ‘had me full of fears – couldn’t tell if it was mental or real . . . I couldn’t stand the light in my eyes; was a wreck by 4 p.m.’ Perhaps all this was why she began to develop what she called ‘this craving of alcohol of mine’.
The committee of doctors was, as ever, on hand to help, but Katherine now refused the treatments Ewing and Craver suggested. ‘They say you do not know a person,’ she wrote assertively, ‘until you have lived with them. I have lived with radium ten years now and I think I ought to know a little bit about it. So far as [the suggested] treatment, I think it’s all bosh.’ She would not kowtow to their demands.
Ewing and Craver were mad about it – and not just Katherine’s stubbornness, but increasing boldness from all four remaining women. ‘Relations are far from satisfactory,’ Krumbhaar wrote. ‘It is difficult to get them to come to see us and they will not accept our treatment.’
Yet in standing up for themselves the women were playing a dangerous game; the committee had control of the purse strings for their medical care. It wasn’t long before Grace was told she could no longer call on Dr McCaffrey; the board also raised concerns about Dr Humphries, writing: ‘It might be that, even though [Humphries] has the women’s confidence, it would be better, all things considered, for someone else to take care of them.’
The company was ‘kicking’ about every bill, yet the firm itself was in good financial health. Despite the Wall Street Crash, the use of luminous dials had not diminished and the firm was also still supplying radium for the Radithor tonic and other medicines; the craze for these had continued, after a momentary dip when the girls’ stories first hit the headlines.
The year 1930 flowed fluidly into 1931. At New Year Katherine was still in hospital, though her tumour was shrinking thanks to Humphries’s attentions; it currently measured 45 centimetres. Come February, she was still unable to do much in the way of walking, but it seemed she had beaten the worst of it.
The spring of 1931 found Grace Fryer in good spirits too; partly because she had made a new friend at her hospital appointments. By chance, the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh was working on the floor above, and once in a while he would visit her. ‘My impression,’ said Grace’s brother Art, who drove her to her appointments, ‘was that these occasional visits made her feel many times better, even if it was only for a short while. Seeing Grace’s spirits higher was perhaps one of the greatest feelings I’ve ever had.’
Grace was still determined to be as positive as she could. It was true that she’d had to revert to wearing her brace, but she did not let it slow her down. ‘I work and I play and I “dance” a bit,’ she said. ‘I go motoring. I even swim – but I can stay in the water only two minutes at a time. I can’t leave the brace off my back any longer than that.’
In the hospital in Orange, however, there were no such diversions for the latest patient who was now wheeled through its doors. Irene Corby La Porte, who had worked with Grace during the war, now followed her friends to Dr Humphries’s office.
It was the summer of 1930 that she’d noticed something wrong. She and her husband Vincent, longing for a family – Irene had suffered three miscarriages by that time – had made love while they were staying in a cottage in Shark River Hills. But it didn’t feel right to Irene, inside. There was a swelling in her vagina, which interfered with intercourse.