One relative who became a frequent visitor was Tom’s big sister Margaret. She was a stocky fifty-one-year-old woman who was ‘the boss of the family’. ‘She was the only woman that I knew of that could drive,’ recalled her nephew James. ‘She had an automobile called the Whippet.’ Another relative remarked: ‘She’d go take care of [Catherine] and take care of the kids. She did what a good sister-in-law would do.’
Father Griffin was another regular visitor, and Catherine welcomed the nuns from the convent too, who brought her a relic of the True Cross. ‘It is like having God in the house with me,’ she exclaimed in elation.
She also took solace from an unexpected source: the public. With her story emblazoned across the newspapers, readers were horrified by it in a way that some of the women’s neighbours had never been. Catherine received hundreds of ‘lovely letters’ that came from coast to coast. People sent her trinkets and ideas for cures; money for flowers to brighten her sickroom; some simply wrote in the hope that ‘my letter will cheer you a little’. ‘You have my sympathy and my greatest desire for a complete victory,’ read one. ‘And I know millions of people think the same.’
Her friends also lifted her spirits. Marie would spend an evening with her, sitting by the side of the wrought-iron bed; Olive ‘brought me a chicken all cooked up lovely’, Catherine wrote to Pearl with pleasure. ‘She, like you dear, are truly pals, and may God bless you both.’
By March, Catherine had cheered considerably. ‘I’m sitting up for a few minutes today,’ she wrote proudly to Pearl, ‘and oh, how good it feels after so long in bed!’
Leonard Grossman had not seen his bed for a very, very long time, or so it seemed. Throughout February and March there was a convoluted exchange of briefs as he and Magid duelled with pen-swords in further book-length submissions to Marvel. ‘He worked around the clock for a week,’ said Grossman’s son. ‘He had three or four secretaries in.’ This crack team of assistants took dictation as Grossman paced his office or sat in his big chair with a cigar and reeled off the brilliant oratory for which he was famous. ‘I have been busy day and night,’ Grossman later wrote to Pearl, ‘working on the radium case.’
On 28 March 1938, the final brief was filed: after consideration of this, Marvel would deliver his verdict. In it, Grossman denigrated the company’s ‘shameful, shifting defence’ and what he called ‘the cesspools in respondent’s alibis’, and continued: ‘Language can coin no fitting words of odium with which to condemn the cool, calculating [Radium Dial Company]. [Workers were] lulled into a false sense of security by dastardly and diabolical false and fraudulent misrepresentations.’ The company knew, he wrote, ‘the legal duties which it owed to [its employees] and murderously refused them’. Its officials repeatedly lied to Catherine ‘to induce her and other employees to remain quiescent and not aroused and not aware of her true condition’. They had, he said, ‘betrayed her’.
He did not mince his words. ‘I cannot imagine a fiend fresh from the profoundest depths of perdition committing such an unnatural crime as the Radium Dial Company did. My God! Is the radium industry utterly destitute of shame? Is the Radium Dial Company utterly dominated by a beast?
‘. . . It is an offense against Morals and Humanity,’ he concluded, ‘and, just incidentally, against the law.’
He wrote powerfully. The judge had declared that he would not make a final ruling until 10 April – yet on Tuesday 5 April the telephone burred in Grossman’s office. He was summoned to the headquarters of the IIC at 205 W Wacker Drive, just around the corner from the Metropolitan Building.
The verdict was in.
54
There was no time to tell the Donohues. Grossman managed to summon those few former dial-painters now living in Chicago – Charlotte Purcell and Helen Munch – and they alone were able to reach the hearing in time; it was held just before noon. Helen was nervously smoking a cigarette as they all crowded into the wood-panelled IIC room to hear the verdict. George Marvel’s judgment was read aloud by the chairman of the commission. Both Magid and Grossman stood to hear him speak; the two attorneys sized each other up as the chairman called for silence.
Mrs Donohue, Marvel had written, was suffering from a disease that was ‘slow, insidious in its nature, progressive and extending over a long period of years’. He concluded: ‘The disablement sustained made Mrs Donohue incapable of following any gainful occupation.’ Those in the court shifted restlessly; they knew all this. The question was: would he find the company at fault?
The written judgment proceeded. ‘The Industrial Commission finds that a relation of employer and employee existed between the company and the plaintiff . . . [Catherine Donohue’s] disability did arise out of and come in the course of her employment.’
He had found the company guilty.
Charlotte and Helen could not help their reaction: they were jubilant. Helen stretched out a grateful hand to Grossman as he turned to them with an irrepressible grin. ‘I am very glad for Mrs Donohue,’ Helen breathed, ‘it is a just decision.’
Marvel awarded Catherine her past medical expenses, back salary for the entire period she had not been able to find employment due to her condition, damages and an annual life pension of $277 ($4,656) for the remainder of her life. It came to a total of some $5,661 ($95,160) and was the maximum possible award the judge could deliver under the provisions of the law.
One suspects that he wished he could have gone further. Marvel was reported to have said after Catherine’s collapse in the courthouse: ‘It would seem to me [from] what has been disclosed here that there could have been a common law action against these people. There is and has been a gross negligence on the part of [the] Radium Dial Company.’
The company officials were guilty. Guilty of causing Catherine’s disablement – and Charlotte’s too – but not just that alone. They were guilty of killing Peg Looney, Ella Cruse, Inez Vallat . . . so many more. Those women’s lives could not be saved, but their murderers were now unveiled in the cold light of day. ‘The whole creation of God,’ Grossman had written in his legal brief, ‘has neither nook nor corner where the Radium Dial Company can hide the secret of its guilt in this case and escape.’ The light of justice now flooded in, leaving the callous killers exposed for what they were. There was no full-page advert to hide behind here; no jolly superintendent smoothing down the girls’ furrowed brows; no hidden test results that kept the truth concealed. The truth, after all these years, was finally out.
‘Justice has triumphed!’ declared Grossman exultantly at the hearing. ‘No other decision is possible under the overwhelming weight of evidence. A just award follows the rule of conscience. Thank God for justice to the living dead.’