As a final addition, around her left wrist she looped a silver-banded watch that Tom had given her before their marriage; it was not luminous. With her spectacles on, a black hat pulled onto her head and a dark fur coat wrapped round her shoulders, she was ready.
Her husband, too, took care with his clothes. Tom usually wore the garments of a labourer: dungarees and rough workwear. Today he donned a dark three-piece suit with a sober striped tie; his thick hair and moustache were neatly combed and he also wore glasses. Having added a light-coloured trilby, he was set to carry Catherine to court.
But he could not do it alone. Clarence Witt, the husband of Olive, helped him. Catherine was seated on a blond wood chair as they lifted her; her skin bruised so easily and her bones were now so fragile that it was difficult for Tom to carry her in his arms, next to his chest: the chair was a safer choice. They carried her all the way to the courtroom and then went up to the fourth floor, where Grossman greeted them, coming to assist.
As they helped her into one of the courtroom’s black chairs, Catherine gazed around at the nondescript room. As it was a hearing before the Industrial Commission, it looked more like a meeting room than a court; it was, in fact, the office of the county auditor. It had a diamond-patterned tiled floor and was dominated by a large wooden table with sturdy legs; chairs were set around it for the key players and then ranged in semicircles beyond that for spectators.
Catherine’s friends were already there, including Pearl Payne and Marie Rossiter, yet the women weren’t the only ones present. Just as the New Jersey girls’ case had done a decade before, the women’s plight had captured the imagination of the nation: reporters and photographers from across the country thronged the room.
Although the media had turned out for the trial, it seemed the Radium Dial executives had not. Neither had all its legal team, for only Arthur Magid was present, seated next to the arbitrator (judge) at the big table. There was no Walter Bachrach, no Mr Reed, no President Ganley; no one but Magid to represent the firm. Perhaps they thought it was beneath their attention, or perhaps some other reason kept them from the court.
Catherine looked closely at the judge: this was the man who would decide her fate. George B. Marvel was sixty-seven years old: a round-faced gentleman with white hair and spectacles, which he wore positioned towards the end of his small nose. He had been a lawyer and bank president prior to joining the Industrial Commission; Catherine wondered what he would make of her case.
As she took in her surroundings, waiting for the trial to begin at 9 a.m., the press took in the sight of her. ‘Mrs Donohue,’ the Chicago Herald-Examiner later wrote, ‘could hardly stand alone. Her arms were no larger than a child’s and her face was drawn and pinched. Her dark eyes burned feverishly behind rimless glasses.’ The Times, somewhat unkindly, called her a ‘toothpick woman’.
Catherine sat at the main table, with Tom seated just behind her. She carefully pulled off her big fur coat and placed it neatly on her lap, but she kept her hat on; she seemed to be cold all the time these days, frozen by the lack of fat on her body and by her failing heart. Feeling the pus starting to ooze again in her mouth, she pulled out a patterned handkerchief and kept it by her. She seemed almost constantly to have to hold it to her mouth.
Grossman checked with her to see if she was ready and she nodded briskly. The lawyer was dressed in his usual three-piece tweed suit, his eyes bright with anticipation of the job ahead. For more than half a year he had worked tirelessly on the women’s case: he knew both he and Catherine were well prepared.
‘We do not belong,’ Grossman stated in his opening to the case, ‘to that resigned class of victims who stretch forth unsuspecting throats to the sharpened sword of even so distinguished an adversary as the law firms of record for respondent in this case . . . Under the intrepid Illinois Industrial Commission, larger and larger grows the brightening rainbow of our hopes for the right against the wrong, and the weak against the strong.
‘. . . Human lives,’ he continued, bringing his introduction round to the woman at the centre of the case, ‘were saved among our country’s army of defence, because Catherine Donohue painted luminous dials on instruments for our forces. To make life safe, she and her co-workers [are] among the living dead. They have sacrificed their own lives. Truly an unsung heroine of our country, our state and country owe her a debt.’
Now, it was that unsung heroine’s turn to speak. Sat at the central table, with Grossman by her side and Magid and Marvel opposite her, Catherine was the first to give evidence. Though she wanted desperately to come across as strong, her voice, projecting through her battered mouth, betrayed her. The papers commented on her ‘weak and muffled voice’, which was ‘faltering’ and ‘barely audible even to [her friends] who sat in a circle behind her chair’.
But speak she did; describing her work, the way the powder covered the girls all over and made them glow, the practice of lip-pointing. ‘That’s the way this terrible poison got into our systems,’ she cried. ‘We never even knew it was harmful.’
Grossman gave her an encouraging smile; she was doing brilliantly. While Catherine took a quick drink of water, her lawyer now introduced into evidence the deceitful full-page advert that Radium Dial had printed in the local paper.
‘Objection,’ said Magid, rising, but George Marvel allowed it to stand.
‘After those New Jersey people died from radium poisoning in 1928,’ Catherine continued, ‘we began to get alarmed. But shortly after that Mr Reed called our attention to [this] advertisement. He said we did not have to worry.’
Marvel nodded slowly, taking notes and reviewing every word of the controversial notice. Catherine kept on with her testimony, looking over her shoulder at her friends, who sat in a row listening intently to her speak. ‘After Miss Marie Rossiter and I had been examined the first time,’ she recalled, turning back to face the judge, ‘we wanted to know why we didn’t get our reports. Mr Reed said to us, “My dear girls, if we ever give a medical report to you, there will be a riot in this place.” Neither of us then realised what he meant.’
But they did now. As Catherine described the encounter in court, Marie ‘paled at her words’.
‘Oh!’ she cried aloud, the implication of her manager’s words sinking in.
‘That is the Mr Reed,’ Catherine added pointedly to the judge, ‘who is still with the company in New York.’