It was not lost on Grossman that this was the same lawyer who only a few years before had maintained radium was a poison in the Inez Vallat case. Grossman dubbed Magid’s attempt to twist the truth ‘brilliant sophistry and attempted magic’ by a ‘past master in the wizardry of language and poison’.
The women’s lawyer added: ‘For evidence in support of respondent’s theory that radium is not a poison, the record is as silent as the Sphinx of Egypt.’ No testimony was presented to back up the company’s claim.
In contrast, the women had plenty to say and with Catherine having recovered a little from her collapse, she was determined to continue giving evidence. Yet her physicians pronounced her too ill to leave her bed and said she was ‘in a state of complete collapse that might prove immediately fatal to her, were she forced to continue as a witness’.
But Catherine was adamant. At this point, Grossman suggested that the hearing be resumed tomorrow at her bedside. If she couldn’t come to the courtroom, then Grossman would bring it to her. George Marvel, after considering the request, agreed.
It fell to Grossman to inform the press. As he announced that a bedside hearing would be held the next day, he added a final comment that he knew would provoke the press into copious column inches.
‘That is,’ he said darkly as he surveyed the gathered media, ‘in case she is alive . . .’
52
When Friday 11 February dawned, Catherine Donohue was still alive. The weather outside on East Superior Street was ‘unsettled’, but Catherine, despite her weakened condition, felt certain of what she had to do.
‘It’s too late for me,’ she said bravely, ‘but maybe it will help some of the others. If I win this fight, my children will be safe and my friends who worked with me and contracted the same disease will win too.’
It had been agreed by Radium Dial that Catherine’s would stand as a test case. If the court found for her, then all the other victims would find justice as well. It made it all the more important to her that she did not fall at this final hurdle; she had to fight on, come what may.
Tom supported her decision to testify, but he was worried sick. ‘All this is too late for us,’ he echoed, ‘but Catherine wants to do all she can to help the others. Even if the excitement—’
His voice broke off abruptly. He had heard what the doctors had said: that continuing as a witness could prove fatal. But Catherine was determined; and who was he to stand in her way? ‘We’ve had so little time together,’ he simply said, quietly. They had been married just six years.
Tommy and Mary Jane, then aged four and three, were at home. They played upstairs as the mass of visitors was directed to the dining room, where Catherine lay on the blue sofa, pillows propping her up and a white blanket covering her to her chin. One after another the guests crowded into the room, some thirty people in all – lawyers, witnesses, reporters and friends.
Catherine barely had the strength to open her eyes to welcome them. She made a ‘pathetic spectacle’; her friends greeted her with evident concern. They usually visited this place socially, but today was a very different occasion. The women sat on chairs lined up by the sofa: Charlotte Purcell, who had come down from Chicago, was closest to Catherine; she sat next to Pearl. Charlotte had declined rapidly of late, having lost a tooth only the week before. She sat huddled in a thick grey coat, its left sleeve hanging empty by her side.
The lawyers drew up chairs at the round oak table and spread their papers across it: Grossman, Magid and Marvel, with Grossman’s secretary, Carol, taking notes. Conscious of his children upstairs, Tom hovered halfway between the dining room and the rest of the house, leaning disconsolately against the door jamb.
The scene thus set, the hearing now began. ‘Weak but determined, Catherine Donohue was ready to resume her story.’
As Grossman questioned his client, he knelt by her side so that she could hear him better. She answered him ‘through closed eyes’. Only occasionally would she open them, and even then she didn’t really seem to see.
‘Show us,’ Grossman encouraged, ‘how you were taught to point [the brush], as you described in testimony yesterday.’ He held out a child’s paintbrush towards her, taken from Tommy’s watercolour set.
As Catherine reached out a skeletal hand from beneath her blanket to take the brush, Arthur Magid rose from where he was seated at the table. ‘Objection,’ he said. ‘We object to the use of the brush, as there is no proof it is the same type as that used in the plant.’
Marvel turned to Grossman. ‘Is there one you could get?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ replied Grossman somewhat tartly. ‘They are being used now at the Luminous Processes plant, which is using all the equipment of the Radium Dial Company, and employs some of the company’s girls. There’s even an official there who was at the Radium Dial Company.’
‘It was decided,’ wrote a reporter after witnessing this exchange, ‘that the brush could be used for the demonstration.’
Catherine took the delicate paintbrush proffered by her lawyer. She paused for a moment, feeling its barely-there weight in her hand, the way her fingers curled familiarly around it.
‘Here’s how it’s done,’ she croaked, after a beat. Her voice sounded tired. ‘We dipped it in the radium compound mixture.’ Catherine dabbed the brush into an imaginary crucible and then, very slowly, bent her stiff arm back and raised the brush to her lips. ‘Then shaped it,’ she said with some emotion, ‘like this.’
She slipped the brush between her lips and twirled it. Lip . . . Dip . . . Paint. When she was finished, she held it up with a shaking hand: the bristles now tapered to a perfect point. Seeing it, ‘a shudder ran through her trembling frame’.
Her friends and former colleagues watched her with their faces ‘drawn with emotional intensity’. The women were visibly affected by her demonstration and fought back tears.
‘I did this,’ Catherine said dully, ‘thousands and thousands of times . . . That was the way we were told to do it.’
Tom watched his wife from the doorway; watched as she demonstrated how she had been killed. Though he had thought himself wrung out of tears, he wept quietly, unashamedly, as Catherine showed off the simple movement that had left her little more than a living corpse.
Grossman cut through the chilling atmosphere in the room with a question. ‘Did any official of Radium Dial ever tell you that the US Government had condemned the use of camel-hair brushes in painting with radium compounds?’
Catherine looked shocked to hear it. ‘No,’ she replied. The girls sitting behind her exchanged looks of anger.
‘Objection,’ piped up Magid, almost speaking over Catherine.
‘Sustained,’ responded Marvel.