Vincent took her to Dr Humphries, who diagnosed a sarcoma, then about the size of a walnut. Despite the doctor’s efforts, her decline was swift. ‘Her whole leg and side began to swell rapidly and paralysed her,’ recalled her sister. ‘She was getting worse every minute.’
Irene was admitted to hospital, but by March 1931 the doctors said there wasn’t very much they could do for her except try to relieve the pain. By then, the area around the top of her thigh had become four times as large, as the sarcoma grew unstoppably inside her. Doctors found that ‘a vaginal examination could hardly be made on account of the tumour blocking the entrance to the genitals’; Irene had great difficulty urinating and the pain was ‘terrific’.
In April, they called in Dr Martland. ‘I found a bedridden patient extremely emaciated and filled with a huge sarcoma,’ he remembered. His diagnosis was immediate and absolute.
‘He told me definitely,’ remembered Vincent La Porte, choking up, ‘that she did [have radium poisoning] and she had about six weeks to live.’
They did not tell Irene, wanting to spare her, though she was smart enough to know. ‘She was always saying, “I know I am dying from radium poisoning,”’ remembered one of her physicians. ‘I convinced her she wasn’t; that she was going to get better. It is tact of a physician not to reveal a fatal prognosis.’
Martland wasted no time enlightening the world about the evolution of radium’s MO. He had seen enough cases now to know that these latent sarcomas – which could leave a victim healthy for years after her exposure to radium, before coming horribly to life and taking over her body – were the new phase of this terrifying poisoning. He added: ‘When I first described this disease, there was a strong tendency among some of those interested in the production and therapeutic use of radium to place the entire blame on mesothorium . . . In the cases autopsied recently, the mesothorium has disappeared while the radium persists.’ He could reach only one conclusion: ‘I am now of the opinion that the normal radioactivity of the human body should not be increased; [to do so] is dangerous.’ It had to be, for each week another dial-painter presented another sarcoma, each in a new location – her spine, her leg, her knee, her hip, her eye . . .
Irene’s family couldn’t believe how fast she was fading from them. But she still had grit in her. On 4 May 1931, as she lay dying in hospital, she filed a claim for damages against USRC; she was willing to settle.
But the company was just about done with settlements. Now they had seen off Berry, they were not too concerned about the adversaries to follow.
Only a month later, after fighting such a hard, hard battle that she was destined never to win, Irene died on 16 June 1931. At the time of her death, Martland said her tumour had become ‘a huge growth’. So much so, he went on, that ‘you couldn’t take the whole mass out together without taking the woman apart. The whole mass was larger than two footballs.’ That was how Irene La Porte died.
Her husband Vincent was filled with such a rage that he knew not what to do with himself. It was red hot at first, searing him with pain and grief, but as time went on it cooled into an icy, diamond-hard desire for vengeance. And Vincent La Porte would fight on for his wife. He would fight on through the courts – through 1931, and ’32, and ’33 and even beyond.
Irene La Porte’s case against USRC would be the one that finally led to a judgment for all the Orange girls. Vincent didn’t know it when he started, but that fight was going to take years yet. The company was in no rush.
Then again – neither was he.
Martland had one final statement to give on the sarcomas; on the insidious time bombs that he now knew were lurking inside any and all dial-painters who had ever once lifted a brush to their lips.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘before we get through, the number will be appalling.’
38
Ottawa, Illinois
August 1931
Catherine Wolfe paused for a moment on her way into work, stopping at the corner of East Superior Street to catch her breath. It was normally a seven-minute stroll to the studio from her house, but these days it took her much, much longer. As she limped down Columbus Street, the sight of the white church lifted her spirits; it was like a second home to her. It was where she had been christened and baptised; where she took communion; where she would marry one day . . .
She had lots of blessings, she thought to cheer herself as she made her way along, counting them off as though they were the beads of her rosary. There was her health: for Catherine, despite the limp, was in fairly good health otherwise. There was Tom Donohue: the couple were due to be married in January 1932. There were her friends’ blessings: Marie had had a healthy little boy, Bill; and Charlotte Purcell a girl, Patricia, who was not born early. And there was her job. Six million Americans were currently unemployed: Catherine earned $15 ($233) a week and she was grateful for every cent.
She had made it, finally, to Radium Dial. There was only Marguerite Glacinski from the old gang to say hi to now. As Catherine made her awkward way over to her desk, she felt the other girls’ eyes on her. Her limp, she sensed, was ‘causing talk’, but Mr Reed never criticised the quality of her work, so she tried not to let the gossip bother her.
She had just begun weighing the material when the girls nearest the window sent the message round that Mr Kelly and Mr Fordyce had come on a visit: the president and vice president of the firm, all the way from Chicago. The girls straightened their blouses and Catherine ran a nervous hand through her dark hair before she pushed herself up from her desk and limped across the studio to the stockroom.
She was partway there when Mr Reed and the executives came into the studio. Mr Reed was pointing out various aspects of the work, but Catherine had this funny feeling that the visiting officials were looking only at her. She got what she needed and made her slow way back to her desk. Mr Reed and the other men were still standing there, having an inaudible conference under their breath. She felt inexplicably anxious, and turned to face the windows, lit by the August sun.
The sunlight was blocked by a shadow.
‘Mr Reed?’ asked Catherine, looking up from her work.
He wanted her to come to the office; she made her tortuously slow way there. Mr Kelly and Mr Fordyce were also in the office. She fiddled with her hair again.
‘I’m sorry, Catherine,’ said Mr Reed suddenly.
Catherine looked at him in confusion.
‘I’m sorry, but we have to let you go.’
Catherine felt her mouth drop open, suddenly dry. Why? she wondered. Was it her work? Had she done something wrong?
Mr Reed must have seen the questions in her eyes.
‘Your work is satisfactory,’ he admitted, ‘it’s your being here in a limping condition.’
She looked from one officer of the company to the next.
‘Your limping condition is causing talk,’ Mr Reed went on. ‘Everyone is talking about you limping. It’s not giving a very good impression to the company.’