Her sister Mollie, meanwhile, wasn’t waiting for any knight in shining armour to come for her. Independent-minded and confident, although unmarried she left her family to board in an all-female house on Highland Avenue, a tree-lined street in Orange with beautiful detached homes. Mollie was still working at the radium company; one of the few girls left, but she was brilliant at her job and didn’t want to leave. Every morning she went to work full of energy and enthusiasm, which was more than she could say for some of her colleagues. Marguerite Carlough, who could normally be relied on for a laugh, kept saying she felt tired all the time; Hazel Vincent, meanwhile, felt so run-down that she decided to leave. She and Theo weren’t yet married, so she got herself a job with the General Electric Company.
But her new surroundings didn’t improve her condition. Hazel had no idea what was wrong with her: the weight was dropping off her, she felt weak and her jaw ached something rotten. She was so concerned that in the end she asked the company doctor at her new firm to examine her, but he was unable to diagnose her illness.
The one thing she could be assured of, at least, was that it wasn’t her work with radium that was the cause. In October 1920, her former employer was featured in the local news. The residue from radium extraction looked like seaside sand and the company had offloaded this industrial waste by selling it to schools and playgrounds to use in their children’s sandboxes; kids’ shoes were reported to have turned white because of it, while one little boy complained to his mother of a burning sensation in his hands. Yet, in comments that made reassuring reading, von Sochocky pronounced the sand ‘most hygienic’ for children to play in, ‘more beneficial than the mud of world-renowned curative baths’.
Katherine Schaub certainly had no qualms about returning to work for the radium firm when she was head-hunted at the end of November 1920 to train the new workers in the watch-company studios. These were mostly based in Connecticut, including at the Waterbury Clock Company. Katherine taught scores of girls the method she herself had learned: ‘I instructed them,’ she said, ‘to put the brush in their mouth.’
The new girls were excited to be working with radium, for the unstoppable craze continued; brought to fever pitch by a visit of Marie Curie to the United States in 1921. In January of that same year, as part of the constant press coverage of the element, von Sochocky penned an article for American magazine. In it, he opined gravely: ‘Locked up in radium is the greatest force the world knows. Through a microscope, you can see whirling, powerful, invisible forces, the uses of which’ – he admitted – ‘we do not yet understand.’ He added, as a cliffhanger on which to leave his readers: ‘What radium means to us today is a great romance in itself. But what it may mean to us tomorrow, no man can foretell . . .’
In fact, no man can foretell much, von Sochocky included. And there was one event in particular that the doctor didn’t see coming: in the summer of 1921, he was frozen out of his own company. His co-founder, George Willis, had sold a large share of his stock to the company treasurer, Arthur Roeder; not long after that, both Willis and von Sochocky were unceremoniously ousted in a corporate takeover. The newly named United States Radium Corporation (USRC) seemed destined for great things in the post-war world, but von Sochocky wouldn’t be at the helm to guide it through whatever lay ahead.
Instead, it was Arthur Roeder who slipped graciously into the vacant president’s chair.
5
Mollie Maggia poked her tongue gingerly into the gap where her tooth had once been. Ouch. The dentist had removed it for her a few weeks ago, after she’d gotten a toothache, but it was still incredibly sore. She gave herself a little shake and turned back to her dials.
The studio was very quiet, she reflected; so many girls had gone. Jennie Stocker and Irene Rudolph had been laid off, and Irene’s cousin Katherine had left for the second time. She and Edna Bolz both went to dial-paint for the Luminite Corporation, another radium firm based in Newark. Of the original girls, it was really only the Smith and Carlough sisters left now – and Mollie herself. Saddest of all, in her opinion, was that Ella Eckert had quit to go to Bamberger’s. It sure wasn’t the same place anymore, not since Roeder took over.
Mollie completed her tray of dials and stood to take it up to Miss Rooney. Despite herself, she found her tongue flicking back to that hole. The pain was just so nagging. If it didn’t get better soon, she thought, she was going to go to the dentist again – and a different one this time, someone who really knew what he was doing.
It didn’t get better soon.
And so, in October 1921, she made an appointment with a Dr Joseph Knef, a dentist who’d been recommended to her as an expert on unusual mouth diseases. For Mollie, the appointment couldn’t come soon enough. For several weeks, the pain in her lower gum and jaw had become so intense that it was almost unbearable. As Knef ushered her into his office, she found herself hoping he would be able to help her. The other dentist had only seemed to make things worse.
Knef was a tall, middle-aged man with tortoiseshell glasses and an olive complexion. He gently probed Mollie’s gums and teeth, shaking his head as he examined the place where her tooth had been removed by the previous dentist. Although it had been over a month since it had been taken out, the socket had failed to heal. Knef observed her inflamed gums and softly touched her teeth, several of which seemed a little loose. He nodded briskly, certain he had found the cause of the trouble. ‘I treated her,’ he later said, ‘for pyorrhea.’ This was a very common inflammatory disease, affecting the tissues around the teeth; Mollie appeared to have all the symptoms. Knef was sure that, with his expert care, her condition would soon improve.
Yet it didn’t improve. ‘Instead of responding to the treatment,’ Knef recalled, ‘the girl became steadily worse.’
It was so terribly, terribly sore. Mollie had more teeth out, as Knef tried to stop the infection in its tracks by removing the source of her pain – but none of the extractions ever healed. Instead, ever-more agonising ulcers sprouted in the holes left behind, hurting her even more than the teeth had.
Mollie struggled on, continuing to work at the studio, even though using her mouth on the brush was extremely uncomfortable. Marguerite Carlough, who was feeling completely well again, tried to engage her in chatter, but Mollie barely responded. It wasn’t just the pain of her gums, which seemed to take up all her concentration, but the bad breath that came with it. There was a disagreeable odour whenever she opened her mouth, and she was embarrassed by it.
At the end of November 1921, her sister Albina married James Larice. The wedding was held the day before Quinta’s daughter’s second birthday, and the bride found herself drinking in her niece’s funny antics with a newly maternal air. Soon, she thought, she and James would have their own little ones running about.