Watch Face
Vivi Kane
They told us it was safe. It had cured cancer when Marie Curie first discovered it and was conducting experiments on persistent diseases; how could it cause it too? We were assured by our supervisors, bosses—people in foreboding authority over us—that radium would make us glow with youth and health. We trusted our employers; after all, Radium Dial Company was a famous Illinois manufacturer of military-grade equipment. Instead, I and countless of my coworkers have deteriorated into chalky bones, sallow skin that hangs as loose as tissue paper, anemic blood that does not bind our sores—far from being the Beautifying Radium as advertised, we are the Living Dead. There is no way they can get away with putting everyone in fatal danger when they protected themselves with suits and shields. After me, Catherine Wolfe Donohue, they won’t escape their inaction.
I had felt such pride working this prestigious, high-paying job. I, Nobody-Me, at just 19, was a sliver of a moonbeam helping our American soldiers in a big way! All the other girls were enlivened by our occupation too. We painted the tiny numbers and figures on watches, radios, objects of all kinds that could possibly be of use by our American soldiers during the Great War. No longer would they be placed in vulnerable positions by lighting a matchstick to see what time it was or what dial to tune for frequency. The brazen Man’s job of stealth combat was being smoothed along by Woman’s hands, delicately painting faces of a watch. We were like honeymooners who did not yet know their marriage would dissolve.
I would sit hunched over with aching shoulders and strained, elongated neck in a posh chair, wearing my best dresses so that when I went out to events after work, I’d stand out in luminescence—I would be the spotlight people would dance under. The radium spores were fairy dust sprinkled upon all of us, a magical substance that was purported to be the cure to all physical ailments and ugliness. As the night came upon the factory and the windows shared less sunlight, the girls’ outlines would drift with the ghosts we would become. A precise desk lamp at each of our stations was positioned to zone in on the watch faces we were painting. I would weave the dainty brush dipped in radium-laced paint between my lips, like a kiss of death, the same way I’d make a frayed thread end cooperate with my sewing needles.
It was not too long after I started working as a painter that I remember a young girl working beside me who was complaining of tooth pain one day: more and more, and then she started getting moaning migraines. She stopped coming in—she was fired for being unreliable—and within a few months, I found out she had died. All of us friends were shook and heartbroken yet thought nothing of the substance we were dealing with. Our suspicions escalated but evidently not soon enough. Within months, snowballing from a unique snowflake case to a flurrying blizzard, we discovered that she was not the first nor last victim; this phenomenon of symptoms repeated with increasing intensity among my coworkers, young and old, and across the country in the Radium Luminous Materials Corporation of New Jersey. Those of us remaining were becoming frightened of when this mysterious illness would strike us. We kept demanding information from our bosses, but they repeated the same thing: radium is safe, mesothorium was the issue, that was only used in the New Jersey plant, keep working. So, we did.
When I started getting toothaches, I tried convincing myself they were phantom pains, that I was only feeling them because of the tension in the air. Then I got migraines, and bone pain, and limping from an excruciatingly painful mass on my hipbone. I was fired next. Hospital visit after visit, my husband Thomas and I found out my dramatic limp was caused by a tumor. Since working at Radium Dial, I have been in and out of medical professionals’ offices across fields. I recall one of many trips to the dentists for my rapidly decaying loose teeth. They had been sounding like dice tossing on a game board of gums. On this such occasion, while he attempted to reconstruct my mouth, I felt a tug of my cheeks. My skin pinched. I heard a click within the base of my ears, then him gasp. The nurse assistant immediately left the room in a whirl. I could not see her, as I was reclined, but I heard everything as clear as ice on a lake. They were frightened, shocked, disgusted—I hadn’t felt unordinary pain from what I had been used to until I knew what they saw: my jaw snapped from its socket, as brittle as a cracker.
As you can see me now, radium has whittled me down to 70 pounds of dust, not at all the magic pixie dust we as teenagers were giddy to believe. My God, I’ve attended Mass all my life, I was baptized and confirmed, I’ve been a devout Catholic; why, why has God allowed this to happen to me! I may yet complain, but then I remember that Job was afflicted…I never did quite like that story, nor did I understand it. If I am humbly honest with myself, I am more of the wife than Job. Now, in the situation I have been cursed to endure, I have obtained the most bizarre, paradoxical comprehension of why Job would praise God for such suffering. The difference, though, is that Job was cleansed and given more than before; I want to have hope, but I am doomed to die with no such grandeur. I do not have the faith that when I face the Creator I will not be appalled and resentful to It for putting me through such angst with no result to unfold. However one may wish to interpret, I have known the Enemy, and I must not become the Enemy. I need to use my misery as a testimony against the unjust, greedy, uncompassionate Radium Dial. They will not get away with this, not because of me, but because of all the girls who have been murdered by their avarice; not because of me, but because of our families that will no longer have mothers, daughters, sisters, grandchildren from the deceased. I found myself fighting the Devil; I have to fight like Hell.
A handful of girls from the New Jersey plant struck up lawsuits against U.S. Radium Corporation, a decade before I had the verve to, for their knowledge of radium’s dire effects to its handlers yet providing paltry cover-ups and excuses. Not dissimilar to what I am battling now, their cases were perpetually being put on hold, hung up with the appeals of They Who Have More Money. Their lawsuits went nowhere, and where they could have gone was stopped altogether by the women’s deaths. Hordes of my family’s savings have been burned away into this lawsuit—we are ashes to these companies, who heat their offices with the fuel we combust. Radium Dial just filed another court appeal, and I am burdened to know what will come of it. Mark my words: It’s too late for me, but maybe it will help some of the others. I pray to whatever shred of god is left in me that any minimal monetary settlement comes of this, Thomas and our 2 children can benefit.
I do wish the media would stop calling us “Radium Girls” as if we were some radioactive superheroines, an ironic and morbid reversal of power…some new Superman comic has just been printed and calling us Radium Girls is as if we were him, destroyed by Kryptonite. No one, save the scientists and executives, could have warned us that every watch face we painted, we would be looking at the time on Earth we have left tick away; that every swift stroke of our brushes was a stroke of the bell tower signaling a funeral; and that each drop of illuminating radium paint was a streak of light slashed from our lives. News reporters—who have published even the smallest snippets of war efforts and alms across seas and at home, who honor a soldier that was sent home for curable wounds, who promulgate parades and church bake sales to benefit our troops—should call us what we really are: martyrs.
Works Cited
Balkansky, Arlene. “Radium Girls: Living Dead Women,” 19 Mar 2019. https://blogs.loc.gov/headlinesandheroes/2019/03/radium-girls- living-dead-women/.
Roeder, Amy. “Deadly occupation, forged report,” 2013. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/centennial-radium-forged-report/.
Wilcoxson, Samantha. “Luminous Women: Catherine Donohue,” 22 Sep 2020. https://samanthawilcoxson.blogspot.com/2020/09/luminous-women-catherine-donohue.html#:~:text=Suffering%20horribly%20from%20radium%20poisoning,was%20happening%20to%20dial%20painters.
Best, Catherine, Koerner, Emily Rees. “Telling the story of the radium girls and their fight for justice,” 17 Mar 2020. https://electrifyingwomen.org/telling-the-story-of-the-radium-girls-and-their-fight-for-justice/.