There was not much more to that first hearing – although Bachrach did now reveal what the company’s defence would be. He said he would ‘contend the paint was not poisonous and that none of the women actually were suffering from radium poisoning’.
Not poisonous. Even from the little Grossman knew of the case, he realised that this position was a complete volte-face on the arguments the exact same lawyers had used in the Vallat suit. Then, the company had said radium was a poison – because poison was not covered by the law and the court had to find against the girls. Now that the law had been rewritten to include poisons, the company was trying the opposite tack.
It was just the sort of slippery, unjust finagling that Grossman had fought against before. Inspired, he rose to the occasion. And even though this was a modest hearing, Grossman now revealed how apt it was that his office was located in Chicago’s theatre district. For he was a showman, ‘a silver-tongued orator’, and as he stood centre stage in the courthouse, he exhibited his skills. Seeing him shine, many of the girls were seen ‘weeping’ that an accomplished attorney was finally on their side.
‘We should have laws,’ Grossman started, in his sombre, melodious voice, ‘that will do away with things that rack, ruin and destroy bodies.’
He turned and scanned his eyes across the crippled women sitting at the desk. He gestured at them with feeling. ‘We do not need to have martyrs such as we have sitting around this table,’ he said, ‘and the many dead who worked with these girls.’
He paused dramatically, and then went on. ‘It is a heavy cross to Calvary,’ he declared, ‘but we will bear it. And, with the help of God, we will fight to a finish.’
49
Work began on the case immediately. That same day, straight after the hearing, Grossman and the women met for a conference so he could gather more information. Then he packed up his big brown leather briefcase, swivelled in his spats and headed on back to Chicago.
Assisting him in his preparations were his loyal secretary Carol Reiser and his German wife, Trudel. Much of the historical radium literature was in German, so Trudel spent hours translating documents as Grossman got up to speed on the intricacies of the case. He regularly turned in eighteen-hour days and his team worked hard to keep up.
Since Al Purcell now lived in Chicago, he nipped over to Grossman’s office to see if the women needed to do anything. ‘For God’s sake,’ Grossman had declared, ‘get a doctor’s statement!’
They followed his directions, but securing their medical records turned out to be difficult. ‘I have written my doctors,’ reported Catherine later that year, ‘and no reply came back.’ Pearl Payne also found that the hospitals where she’d been treated refused to release her records. She ended up begging her doctors: ‘Please help me get these records. This case is up for final hearing.’
The women were not the only ones requesting records. That fall, Grossman served notice on Radium Dial to ‘produce [the results of] all physical examinations of employees’. The company had concealed the true test results: Grossman wanted to know how much the firm had known, and when.
The women were delighted by his diligence. ‘At a great sacrifice,’ Pearl Payne wrote to commend him, ‘you have continued daily to lay other engagements aside to formulate the great mass of information necessary to properly present these cases.’
Grossman decided that the lead litigant would be Catherine Donohue; followed by Charlotte Purcell, whom Grossman described as ‘my next best case’. Catherine didn’t necessarily have the most evidence behind her, nor was she the most compelling personality to take the stand. It wasn’t even that she had the most fire in her belly for the fight. It was simply believed that she was the woman who would be next to die. ‘She hasn’t long to live,’ Pearl said quietly of the decision. ‘We want her to have her day in court.’
Although Catherine was no more an extrovert than her husband, she nevertheless seemed accepting of the responsibility. ‘The strength for the women in my family,’ said one of her relatives, ‘has always been to do the right thing and stand up for what you believe in. [Catherine] saw a huge wrong and [she wasn’t] going to be quiet about it.’
While Grossman beavered away in Chicago, it seemed a long and lonely fall to Catherine Donohue. Her condition continued to deteriorate, more and more rapidly. ‘My hip is very bad, Pearl,’ Catherine admitted to her friend. ‘It is all I can do to get around at all.’ That hard lump on her hip was growing undeniably bigger. She took X-ray treatments for it but later said, ‘Well, I took thirty of them and it sure failed to give me any relief.’ Her physicians seemed unable to stop her decline, but Catherine refused to give up hope. There’d been some coverage a while back about a treatment that might eliminate radium in victims’ bones – she just needed to hang in there, and a cure would come.
With Catherine unable to manage the stairs anymore due to her misshapen hip, Tom brought her wrought-iron bed downstairs to the front room; he slept on a couch at the foot of it. He made it as comfortable as he could for Catherine; there was a makeshift lamp at the head of the bed, as well as a radio, and he hung a very large wooden crucifix on the wall above the bed. It had Jesus on it, so He could look over and look after Catherine as she slept. Her crutches were set against the wall, ready for when she was assisted to the bathroom; a ‘well-worn pair of slippers’ rested by their feet. The ‘timid-looking bunny rabbit’ given to the children last Easter kept her company on the bedside table.
The room had two windows in the front and a window to the west. ‘It had good light,’ recalled her niece Mary, ‘but they kept the shades drawn; I suppose that was what she wanted.’ It made for a rather dim setting – but then Catherine had a light of her own.
‘Even now,’ she said numbly, ‘my body gives off a faint luminous glow when surrounded by darkness.’
‘You could see every bone in her body,’ remembered her nephew James. ‘She was just lying on the bed.’
Marie Rossiter had once remarked of the girls’ games in the darkroom at work: ‘You don’t see nothing, no body, all you see is the radium.’ Her words now seemed strangely prophetic.
‘People are afraid to talk to me now,’ Catherine confessed. ‘Sometimes it makes me terribly lonesome – they act as though I’m already a corpse. It’s hard to have people around and still to be alone.’
Even when the family came to visit – the Donohues had always hosted meals after church on Sunday, when they’d serve eggs and bacon and Catherine would pour tea from her white china teapot printed with pink rosebuds – James remembered that they talked in the other room so Catherine could rest. Someone else now poured the tea.