Catherine hung her head, though whether with shame or anger or hurt, she was not quite sure.
‘We feel . . .’ Mr Reed broke off for a moment, to make eye contact with his bosses, who bestowed on him an agreeing nod of endorsement: they were all in this together. ‘We feel it is our duty to let you go.’
Catherine felt stunned. Shocked, wounded. ‘I was told to go,’ she remembered later. ‘I was told to go.’
She stepped out of the office, left the radium men behind. She picked up her purse and limped back down the stairs to the first floor. All around her was familiarity – for nine years, six days a week, she had spent her life in this studio. The walls of the old high school seemed to ring for a second with the laughter of the girls she had known there: of Charlotte and Marie; Inez and Pearl; of Mary; of Ella; of Peg.
No one was laughing now.
Catherine Wolfe, fired for being sick, swung open the glass door at the entrance of the studio. It was six steps down to the sidewalk, and on every one she felt her hip ache. Nine years she had given them. It had meant nothing.
No one watched her go. The men who had fired her got on with their day, Mr Reed no doubt enlivened by the presence of Messrs Kelly and Fordyce; he was a company man, and the opportunity to rub shoulders with the bosses was not to be missed. The girls were too busy painting to put down their brushes. Catherine knew, as she reached the final step, what they would all be doing inside. Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint.
No one watched her go. But Radium Dial had underestimated Catherine Wolfe.
The firm had just made a very big mistake.
39
Orange, New Jersey
February 1933
Katherine Schaub bit down hard on her lip to keep from crying out, her eyes squeezing shut with the pain.
‘All done,’ said the nurse reassuringly, having changed the dressing on Katherine’s knee.
Katherine opened her eyes warily, not wanting to look down at her leg. All through the past year, doctors had been keeping tabs on her tumour: it was 45 centimetres, they told her; 47 and a half; 49. Its earlier reduction had been reversed. In the past week or so, the bone tumour had broken through her paper-thin skin; now, the lower end of her femur was sticking out of the wound.
She tried to focus her mind on happier things. Before she’d been admitted to hospital, she had spent some time at a private sanatorium, Mountain View Rest, for her nerves, and that had been quite wonderful. She had finished writing her memoir; had even had an excerpt of it published in a social reformers’ magazine. She, Katherine Schaub, was a published author: it was what she had always longed to be. ‘I have been granted,’ she wrote with peaceful pleasure, ‘[a] priceless gift – I have found happiness.’
If only she could have stayed in the mountains; she felt so much brighter there. Yet as her health worsened and she’d had to take regular taxis into Orange to see Dr Humphries, the board of doctors had baulked at paying the bills. In fact, they’d had enough of the women’s expenses altogether.
The previous February, 1932, Katherine, Grace, Edna and Albina had all received a no-nonsense letter from Dr Ewing: ‘We wish to inform you that no bills will be approved by the Commission for any services which have not been specifically approved by Dr Craver. The Commission feels that they must scrutinise expenses more carefully.’ The board now refused to cover medicines ‘we do not feel are useful’, routine doctors’ visits and home nurses; the latter was a service the women increasingly relied on to help clean and dress themselves. The board was acting, it said, ‘to prevent this “exploitation” of the radium corporation’.
There had been fallout from the committee’s decision. For Katherine, it made her even more determined not to submit to their experiments: ‘I have suffered my share . . . I don’t think that I should be at the mercy of these New York doctors.’ The physicians moaned heartily about her behind her back: ‘[She is] one of the most difficult patients to handle,’ complained one. ‘I am really at a loss what to do with this highly hysterical woman.’
Katherine’s suspicion of medical men appears to have made her nervous of accepting any therapeutic advice. Dr Humphries recommended a leg amputation, but she refused. ‘I have made no headway with her,’ Humphries wrote, ‘and doubt very much being able to do so.’ Katherine could be as stubborn as a mule when she wanted to be; it was perhaps partly why she had been one of the five girls who’d won a settlement from USRC in the first place.
Ewing’s letter had mentioned ‘the very depressed state of business’ as a reason for the withdrawal of expenses. Inevitably, as the economy crumbled, sales of radium watches declined along with everything else. But it wasn’t only that which was now sucking the dollars from the firm’s bank account. It was the case of Eben Byers.
It had been all over the papers last March. Byers was a world-renowned industrialist and playboy; a wealthy man who raced horses and lived in a ‘magnificent home’: he was high-profile and important. After receiving an injury back in 1927, his doctor had prescribed Radithor; Byers was so impressed with it he consumed several thousand bottles.
When his story made the news, the headlines read: THE RADIUM WATER WORKED FINE UNTIL HIS JAW CAME OFF. Byers had died of radium poisoning on 30 March 1932, but before he died he gave evidence to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) that Radithor had killed him.
The authorities reacted with much more alacrity than they had in the cases of the dial-painters. In December 1931, the FTC issued a cease-and-desist order against Radithor; the US Food and Drug Administration would go on to declare radium medicines illegal. Finally, the American Medical Association removed the internal use of radium from its list of ‘New and Nonofficial Remedies’, where it had remained even after the discovery of the dial-painters’ deaths. It seemed wealthy consumers were much more worthy of protection than working-class girls; after all, dial-painting was still going on, even in 1933.
Katherine had read the stories about Byers with sadness for the victim, but also an overwhelming sense of vindication. Radium was a poison. The girls knew it, intimately, but until the Byers case, public opinion had swung the other way. Indeed, with four of the famous radium girls still alive – almost five years on from their case – there had been much muttering that their lawsuit had been nothing more than a fraudulent scheme to get money from the company.