‘In her presence?’ Dalitsch now asked, uncertainly.
But he had said enough. He had said enough in the way he had paused. Catherine ‘sobbed, slipped down in her chair and covered her face’ with her hands. At first, silent tears ran down her cheeks, but then, as though the full weight of what he hadn’t said hit her, she ‘screamed in hysteria’. She screamed aloud, as she thought of leaving Tom and her children; as she thought of leaving this life; as she thought of what was coming in her future. She hadn’t known; she had had hope. She had had faith. Catherine had truly believed she was not going to die – but Dalitsch’s face said otherwise; she could see it in his eyes. So she screamed, and the broken voice which had struggled to speak was now made powerful in her fear and distress. Tom ‘broke down and sobbed’ at the sound of his wife’s cries.
The scream was a watershed; after it, Catherine could not keep herself upright. She collapsed and ‘would have fallen had not a physician nearby caught her’. Dr Weiner had leapt to his feet to hold her up, and as he did so Tom seemed released from his paralysis. He rushed to Catherine’s side as she lay slumped in her chair. While Weiner felt for her pulse, Tom’s concern was only for Catherine. He cradled her head with his hand, touched her shoulder to try to bring her back to herself; back to him. Catherine was sobbing hard, her mouth wide open, showing the destruction inside: the gaps where her teeth should have been. But she didn’t care who saw; all she could see was Dalitsch’s face in her mind. Fatal. This is fatal. It was the first time she’d been told.
Pearl, seeing her friend so distraught, was just a moment behind Tom. The two of them bent over Catherine, Pearl proffering a cup of water that was not acknowledged. Tom had his arms around Catherine, trying to get through to her as she cried. His labourer’s hands supported her, one on her back, another pressed to her front, trying to show her he was there.
The press photographers wasted no time in capturing the moment. Tom was suddenly aware of them, suddenly aware that he wanted to get his wife away from all this. Leaving Pearl to care for Catherine – she gently stroked her friend’s dark hair – Tom summoned Grossman and Weiner and together the three men lifted Catherine’s chair and carried her from the courtroom, Pearl clearing the way through the people.
‘The woman’s sobs,’ a paper commented bleakly, ‘could be heard from the corridor.’
As the judge called an immediate recess, Catherine was carried to the county clerk’s office and laid out on a desk. Pearl spread Catherine’s fur coat beneath her so she had something soft and pleasant against her skin; books of birth records propped up her head as a makeshift pillow. Tom gently eased his wife’s glasses from her face and stood by her side; he had both hands on her: one holding her hand which wore his watch and the other softly caressing her hair to calm her. Pearl held Catherine’s other hand, trying to reassure her friend. They both murmured soothingly to the woman they both loved.
Catherine, by now, was too weak for tears, but as she felt her husband standing near her, she did have one thing to say. In a ‘feebly wavering’ voice, she clutched his hand and murmured: ‘Don’t leave me, Tom.’
He wasn’t going anywhere.
Catherine was unable to return to the hearing. ‘She is in total collapse,’ said an attending doctor. ‘She will not, cannot, live very much longer.’
Tom was not there to hear his words; he had carried Catherine home to East Superior Street. Yet when the papers printed the pictures of Tom and Catherine the next day, they pulled no punches. Above a photograph of the stricken couple was the headline: DEATH IS THE THIRD PERSON HERE.
The hearing resumed at 1.30 p.m. in Catherine’s absence. Having settled his wife at home, Tom had made his way back to the courthouse, wanting to represent Catherine at this hearing which was so very important to her. If she was not well enough to be there, then he would stand for her instead.
The hearing picked up where it had left off, as Tom sat numbly in a chair at the back of the room.
‘Is her condition fatal?’ asked Grossman of Dalitsch.
The doctor cleared his throat. ‘It is fatal in her case,’ he acknowledged.
‘In your judgement,’ asked the lawyer, ‘what might be Catherine Donohue’s reasonable [life] expectancy?’
‘I don’t think we can state definitely,’ Dalitsch began to bluster, perhaps conscious of her husband sitting in court, ‘depending on the care she had and so on – treatment . . .’
Grossman fixed him with a look. This was a courtroom, not a clinic, and it did not help Catherine’s case to beat around the bush. Dalitsch straightened up under Grossman’s glare.
‘I would say . . . months,’ he stated bluntly.
Tom felt tears at his eyes again. Months.
‘There is no cure in its advanced stages?’ queried Grossman.
‘No,’ said Dalitsch. ‘There is none.’
As the afternoon wore on, the other doctors were questioned. With each new testimony, the words became a litany of loss that Catherine’s husband was forced to hear.
‘She is beyond a doubt in the terminal stages of the disease,’ testified Dr Weiner.
‘She has but a short time to live,’ concurred Loffler. ‘There is absolutely no hope.’
No hope. No cure. No Catherine.
Tom listened to it all with tears streaming down his cheeks. He endured it all. By the end of the afternoon, he was near collapse and had to be led from the courtroom.
The company lawyer, for his part, made no showy gestures. He limited his cross-examinations of the doctors to what Radium Dial considered the critical issue: was radium a poison? It seemed irrelevant to Magid that Loffler declared, ‘There is a definite causal relationship between her employment and the condition in which I found her.’ Magid instead declaimed that, ‘Radioactive substances may be abrasive, but not poisonous.’
‘The company’s position,’ the slick attorney explained, ‘is that [the women] cannot recover compensation under the new section of the law because that relates only to diseases incurred from poisons as a result of occupation.’ With the firm determining radium was not a poison, they held themselves ‘not liable’.
Magid called radium poisoning a ‘phrase’ that was ‘merely a convenient method of describing the effect of radioactive substances upon the human body’. It was a position he maintained even when Loffler said angrily, ‘The radioactive compounds had a poisonous effect upon [Catherine’s] system and their effect was not merely what is ordinarily termed abrasive, but [comes] under the medical definition of poisons!’