‘It is an effort to do things in the ordinary way, to act normally,’ confessed Pearl. ‘I don’t show it, but at present I am nervous and shaking. What I have lost I can never recover.
‘I am missing so much,’ she almost cried out. ‘The chance of being a mother again . . . I can never be the mother and wife that my fine husband deserves.’
As for Catherine, she suddenly burst out with just three words: ‘All are gone!’ Perhaps, like Katherine Schaub, she had a chorus of ghost girls playing in her head: Ella and Peg and Mary and Inez . . .
‘The words,’ remarked Griffin, ‘came unexpectedly and strong. There was silence again.’
For Tom Donohue, listening in, it was too much. He spoke up bitterly, his voice quivering. ‘We’ve got humane societies for dogs and cats, but they won’t do anything for human beings,’ he spat out. ‘These women have souls.’
Griffin asked one final question before he took his leave. ‘How do you keep up your morale?’
It was Catherine who answered, ‘unexpectedly with startling effect and strength’. ‘By our faith in God!’ she said.
But though Catherine’s faith was as strong as it had ever been, as the days went by her body weakened. Just a week or so later, she wrote to Pearl: ‘Tried to write sooner but somehow I can’t write anymore. It is so difficult for me to get up for any length of time and when I do I’m all in for a week afterwards.’ The continuing legal trouble was not helping her. ‘I only wish my case was through with,’ she said wistfully. ‘Lord knows I need the medical care, and need it badly.’
Though her friends tried to rally round her – Olive brought fruit and a pail of fresh eggs and Pearl even bought her a new nightgown from the meagre funds she and Hobart had to spare – Catherine’s body refused to respond to their comforting gestures. She suffered excruciating, constant pain that required the continuous administration of narcotics. Her jawbone continued to fracture into ever-smaller fragments, each new break more painful than the last, and with the new breaks came a new development.
Catherine started haemorrhaging from her jaw.
She lost approximately one pint of blood each time. Though she wanted to stay at home with Tom, her physician Dr Dunn rushed her to hospital; what Catherine called ‘a hurried-up trip’. ‘I want to be home,’ she wrote forlornly to Pearl from her hospital bed. ‘Am so lonesome . . . Doctor wants me here; Tom wants a nurse at home. I just don’t know what to do. I suffer so much pain.’ She begged Pearl to visit her: ‘Come over if possible, won’t you, as soon as you get this letter? I’m so lonesome and blue.’
Dr Dunn was increasingly concerned for Catherine. Though he kept her in hospital for several weeks, her condition was terminal; she was so weak that he thought the slightest labour could be lethal. He issued a formal statement: ‘In my opinion any unusual stress such as a court appearance might prove fatal. I have advised and urged her to forgo any such activity.’
But this was Catherine Donohue he was talking about. No matter what her doctor said, she was determined to fight Radium Dial tooth and nail. The company was not going to get away with it this time. Released from hospital by the start of June 1938, she was home just in time to hold a meeting at her house the day before the appeal hearing. Grossman and the other women were there. ‘There’s not much hope for me now,’ Catherine said to them, acknowledging it. ‘I only have to wait a while. It will help [you girls] to win and it will help my children.’
Her children and Tom, she said, ‘are worth all the pain and suffering’.
Dr Loffler visited the same day. Her thin body ‘barely dented the mattress’ as he took her blood, drawing it from ‘arms scarcely thicker than fingers’. Catherine was so weak these days she did not wear her glasses anymore, but the watch Tom had given her still encircled her wrist, on the tightest fastening they could find. Whereas once she had dressed smartly in her polka-dot dress for such gatherings, now she wore a starched white cotton nightgown, embroidered with two crucifixes on the pointed collar.
When Dr Loffler weighed her, Catherine knew at once that he would not overrule the veto Dunn had put on her attending tomorrow’s hearing. Catherine Donohue now weighed 61 pounds (4 stone); she was not much heavier than her five-year-old son. In truth, even if she had been well enough to attend, it would have been almost impossible for them to transport her. She could not bear the slightest pressure on her body anymore.
Although Catherine was unable to attend the appeal hearing, she trusted Grossman implicitly to represent her interests. ‘He is just about the best there is, isn’t he?’ she said of him. And Grossman was not alone in standing up for her: Pearl, Charlotte, Marie, Olive and the other women were there; and so was Tom Donohue. The hearing was held before a ‘capacity crowd’ on a Monday afternoon. Having seen Catherine’s condition the day before, Grossman now declared the case was a ‘race with death’. ‘If Mrs Donohue dies before a final ruling,’ he said solemnly, ‘her estate under the law would receive nothing.’
Perhaps that was why Magid immediately requested a postponement; but it was not granted. Presumably on Catherine’s request, Grossman suggested that a bedside hearing be held so she could be present, but this was vigorously contested by the firm. In the end, the judge determined that he would hear the appeal evidence that very afternoon.
The gathered media were speculative about what grounds Radium Dial might have for an appeal. One of the company’s arguments was that the IIC was without jurisdiction, but this was immediately dismissed. Another was the statute of limitations (again); and a third argument was something completely different.
For Radium Dial now contested the girls’ claims altogether: the firm alleged they were lying. As sworn evidence, Radium Dial submitted to the court a formal statement from one Mr Reed, the girls’ former boss.
In it, Reed swore ‘he never told anyone, nor ever heard anyone tell, Catherine Donohue or other employees radium wouldn’t hurt them’. He also swore ‘he was not on the company payroll during the time Catherine was exposed’ to radium. His wife, Mercedes Reed, also submitted a signed stipulation. Both she and her husband said they ‘would testify that neither of them gave, nor did anyone else in their hearing give, any orders or instructions to Catherine Donohue to insert in [her] mouth the brushes used’.