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Five years before I was born, my father, Leonard J. Grossman, represented women from Ottawa, Illinois in litigation against the Radium Dial Corporation seeking not merely damages but also recognition of what had been done to them. I grew up in the shadow of the Radium Dial case, a landmark in workers’ rights in this country. I was deeply proud of my father and infuriated, as he was, by the injustice inflicted on these women. I am sure this background is one reason I became a government lawyer enforcing workers’ rights. So when I came across Radium Halos by Shelley Stout I was very excited.
Sometimes fiction can speak truth in ways that the bare facts cannot. Ms. Stout has found a unique voice in which to tell the tragic story of the Radium Dial workers and at the same time to say much about life in this country. The story goes beyond the Radium Dial case and reflects much about our attitudes toward work, women, mental illness and aging. Along the way it speaks of fear and loyalty and truth itself.
Leonard Grossman
September 2009
Young folks these days complain too much. When I was young, they taught me to never complain about nothing. If the boss asked you to work a extra hour, you done it without saying a word. If you had a bellyache, you suffered through it until you got home, when you could curl up in bed with a hot-water bottle.
I don't mind the hospital. I don't never say one bad thing about it. By and large, I'm happy most days. Happy about being here at Mannington, because it's home. I don't never mind the banging, hissing radiators in the winter. I sleep right through the racket most nights. On the hottest summer days, I survive the heat, with only huge, clanking fans to swirl around the stifling air.
Some of the girls here don't like it when the nurse makes them get up so early. They don't like to be told to work hard. They whine and carry on. Not like when me and my sister Violet was in our teens and we worked at the Radium Dial in 1923. Course, we was told we could make better wages if we was to work hard. Our supervisor Mrs. Peltz told us if we took pride in our jobs and saved our earnings, we could have us a nice life.
Mrs. Peltz was a older lady, with long eyelashes and deep maroon-colored lipstick. She had only her four front teeth, then gaps for the rest. I couldn't tell for sure, but it looked like as if she'd painted beauty marks on her wrinkly cheeks.
Me and Violet was in the hall waiting for our interview at the Radium Dial. We had our friend Clara Jane to thank. She already had her a job at the factory. Some of the other girls was outside the office in the hall with us, and a couple of them talked about somebody who begin work last month, only to quit after four days. They said ever single morning at ten o'clock she got sick to her stomach. At first, they thought she was in a family way, but it turns out she just didn't like the taste of the paint. She had to go and find her a different job.
I set and stared out into the big factory room where the girls was painting. The ceiling seemed to go up to three stories high, just like the auditorium back at Belmont High in North Carolina, where we was from.
After a few minutes, Mrs. Peltz invited Violet into the office first, and then me behind her. We set in the chairs across from her desk. She had her some pretty roses in a vase, and she held up the cards we filled out before we come for the interview.
"I understand you're new to Ottawa. Even new to Illinois."
Just like always, I let Violet do the talking. She could talk better because she studied elocution harder than me in school. "Yes ma'am, we are."
"Well, we hope you'll stay with us for a long time to come."
"Thank you," we both said together.
Mrs. Peltz smiled at me, with her gaps for teeth. "Now girls. I'm sure Clara Jane has told you what the job entails, has she not?"
Violet crossed her legs and pulled down the hem of her dress. "Yes, she told us about the watch dials."
"Oh. Well you girls won't be graduating to watch dials just yet." She rolled her eyes when she said it, like as if we was too dumb to understand. "You'll be starting off with the clock dials. You'll have thirty days to show us how well you do. Then, when quality control says you're ready to graduate up to watches, we'll let you give them a try."
"I see," Violet said.
"Now, have you girls had a little taste of the paint yet? Some girls aren't fond of the taste, and we can't hire them."
Me and Violet turned to each other and giggled. I held a couple fingers over my mouth, because we was both recollecting the same thing. Violet told on me. "Helen here, when she was a baby, she used to eat the paint chips off the sideboard. I was about four-and-a-half, and my job was to keep her away, because she would get these red marks on the edges of her mouth from the red paint. Then, one day, I tried one of them too, and, well, we both became fond of paint chips. After that, our daddy gave us both a whipping." Mrs. Peltz smiled, but I could tell she didn't think it was all that funny. "Good," she said. "Then you shouldn't mind working here at all."
She pursed her lips and then opened her desk drawer, taking out a little jar of pale bluish-green paint and three skinny brushes. Before she even opened the jar, she stuck one of the brushes between her lips, to get it wet. "Now, I'll teach you to do your tipping."
"Tipping?" I asked.
"That's how we get a sharp point on the brush." She stuck the tip of the brush in the paint, then back again in between her lips to make the brush more pointed. "The taste isn't bad once you get used to it. If you want to achieve specialist, you'll need to."
"What's specialist?" Violet asked.
"That's the highest you'll achieve as a dial painter. First, you'll start off as apprentice. Then, when you've received your certificate for expert, you'll be able to do the watch dials. Later, if your production quota exceeds our standard goals, you'll be rewarded with an Excellence in Training plaque, and you'll be in our specialist category. Those girls have special privileges they've earned, by working hard and producing more than the others. And they make more money too, of course. You'll be paid by the piece."
It was all too much to take in at one time, and I hoped Mrs. Peltz would change the subject.
She opened a different drawer and give each of us a bare clock dial to practice on, and give us each a skinny brush too. I went first. I took a deep breath and stuck the dry, tickly brush between my lips. Then, I stuck the tip of the brush into the paint. "That's right, Helen. Now, hold the clock face in your other hand."
Violet watched me, blocking my light, so I nudged her out of my way.
"Don't forget to do your tipping," Mrs. Peltz said. "You need to kiss the brush between your lips. Make it a nice sharp point, so you can paint the tiny numbers."
"Yes ma'am," I said, worried I would make a mistake. My hand begin to shake, but I knowed I had to try. I stuck the tip of the wet brush between my lips, and kissed it. Soon after that, the paint slipped to the back of my tongue and down my throat. I swallowed it, and it tasted and smelled like a gritty medicine. All of a sudden, I wished I hadn't come to Illinois.
"It feels sandy, doesn't it?" Mrs. Peltz said.
"Yes ma'am. It does." I just stared at her, trying to suck the sandy feel off my tongue. I didn't want to kiss the brush no more. I tried to paint the number one on the dial, but Mrs. Peltz said to do the number eight first, because that was easier. Round I went with the brush, and I only made one teeny mistake. Mrs. Peltz told me I was a natural. After a while, Violet tried too.
Violet wasn't near as good a painter as me. She tried real hard that first day, but more often than not, she lost her patience.
I heard a expression once--"The good die young." But you couldn't rightly say that was the case with my sister Violet.
#
I reckon most folks know what's real and what isn't. Like if they have them a bad dream that wakes them up in the middle of the night while their fists is still squeezed and their heart is in a gallop. Nightmares can be like that. Now and again, I have me a bad dream about Violet. She's been dead since 1934.
Usually that nightmare don't bother me for long. I might go right back to sleep after or get me a smoke and go up to the nurse's station for a light. I can do some of my best thinking late at night when everbody else is asleep. I set in the dark, thinking of the dream and recollecting my sister when she was still alive.
It's easy to tell it's a dream because the ward is quiet--no radiators clanging or slippers shuffling across the tile floor. What happens first is I'm setting on the floor of my room at Mannington. My legs is bent to my chest, and my hands is resting on the tops of my knees. Suddenly, the air turns so cold my bones chill, then my heart races and my breath comes in sharp, painful bursts. I'm still cold, but I turn myself over to push up from the floor.
Through the doorway, the light is a faded rose color. Like a gunshot, the rose colored light changes to bright white, and I squeeze my eyes shut and cover them with one arm. I listen for the sound of Violet humming "Little Ella," her favorite song from when we was girls down in Belmont. The humming gets louder, then Violet turns up in the doorway, and the brightness goes back to the rose color.
The vision I see next is Violet from 1933, just before she got sick and passed. Violet's fair skin takes on a blush, and she hasn't aged at all, the way I have in the past thirty-nine years. She wears a flowery robe tied at the waist with a wide, yellow sash, and she carries a box in her hands. "Helen, don't be scared," she says to me. But I already am skittish as a ground squirrel.
Next comes the part that always makes me wake up. I tell my arms to stay by their sides, but they don't listen. I can't control my fingers as they lift the lid on the box. And I can't control my eyes neither, as they peer inside at the black emptiness. More than anything, I want to look away, because nobody needs to tell me what I'm about to see. I wait, and then something fades in. It's a skeleton head with a broad grin of overlapped teeth. I have one of those screams trapped in my throat, and I taste blood on the back of my tongue. Then finally, the scream finds a way out and I wake up.
I don't know how many times I've had me that dream. It gives me the shivers even now to tell it. But last night was different. When I woke up from the nightmare, I wasn't in my bed. I was flat on a gurney with orderlies all around me. My wrists was strapped down. Somebody's sweaty hand clutched my last free ankle, buckling it into the leather strap. Because I was screaming, a orderly snapped, "Quiet down, Helen."
We left the room on the gurney through the double doors of the ward. Along the way from the corner of my eye, I took in the smirking faces of other ladies on the ward. Also some of the nurses. With my wrists and ankles so tight inside those leather straps, all I could do was wiggle my spine trying to escape before we reached the underground tunnel. I hate the tunnel. "Give it a rest, Helen," the orderly said, in a firecracker voice. "You're only going to the infirmary."
Above my head, the ceiling changed from those tube lights to the arched brick ceiling of the tunnel. The floor dipped as we went under the building. Spider webs and dust clung to the faded bricks like Spanish moss. The rolling gurney wheels scraped against the cement floor, with the dead, damp smell all around me like a fog. Ever few feet overhead, a bare light bulb blinded me, while the wheels jolted the gurney, driving over stray stones below or cracks in the cement. I was still screaming because any time I'm in the tunnel I feel like as if I'm in a tomb and it's smothering me.
"We're almost there." I knowed the orderly was meaning to calm me down, but instead, the voice startled me, and I sucked in a breath.
At the other end of the tunnel, a door opened and I had to squint at the bright infirmary lights. Somebody grabbed my arm and then a needle jabbed my skin. I turned my head to tell them to stop, but instead the room faded to nothing.
#
When I opened my eyes next time I wasn't screaming no more, and I wasn't scared, neither. I wondered if maybe I hadn't fell to the floor and they'd scooped me back up, because ever part of me hurt--my neck, my arms, even my back. It felt better to be still. I knowed they give me something, because I could smell formaldee-hyde and my mouth was pasty.
For some reason, my wrists and ankles was still strapped down, only now I was on a bed, alone in a empty room. Then Dr. Winslow come in, followed by the new doctor, only at first, I couldn't recollect his name.
"Helen, do you remember Dr. Stokes?"
Dr. Stokes. That was his name. Dr. Stokes had him a bird's beak for a mouth and dark rimmed glasses.
"Ye- yes..." My voice crackled like split logs. The insides of my cheeks was stuck to my gums, and I couldn't get my tongue to form a word.
The two doctors talked about me to each other like as if I wasn't there, about my name, which is Helen Waterman, and my age, which is 65. They talked about my mental illness.
"Helen, we're going to remove your restraints. Can we do that? Will you sit up for us?" Between my toes and the end of the bed was a long distance, since I hadn't never growed past five-foot-nothing.
"Wa-ter," I said, hoping somebody would give me some.
"We'll go ahead and get you out of these while we wait for the nurse, all right Helen?"
Everthing with Dr. Stokes is "we." "We will do this, or we'll do that." Like as if he was a group of people instead of just one doctor. I like him anyway. He has a youthful, sweet-smelling breath. Not like some of the other Mannington doctors whose breath stinks of garlic or cigars. When me and Violet was younguns, we had to put up with our daddy's cigars, but that didn't mean we enjoyed smelling them.
But Dr. Stokes is nothing like me and Violet's daddy. Our daddy was one to change his mood often--at times in good spirits, and at other times, down in the dumps. On occasion, he was mighty strict about certain things. Us girls had to make things up, or leave out information so's he wouldn't know what we was up to. Other times, he would allow us to do as we pleased.
Just then, a nurse come in with a metal tray on wheels. I recollected that nurse from last time I was in the infirmary. Nurse Barnes is from New York, and she's always making a fuss about being from Upstate New York, like as if that makes her better than everbody else. Better than all of us from North Carolina, with her fancy talk. At least now and again I try to talk like folks do on the television, but it don't always come out just right.
Nurse Barnes was wearing a nurse's dress, which is uncommon. Ever since it got to be the 1970s, most ladies don't dress up much no more. They go out in slacks instead of dresses.
"Nurse Barnes, please bring Helen a cup of water." Dr. Winslow finally got me out of the straps.
I decided right then and there, I wouldn't say nothing else until I had me a drink.
Once my hands and legs was free, I rubbed my wrists. The straps had made my skin raw, and the leather had left the smell of stale sweat.
Dr. Winslow said he was leaving me in the care of Dr. Stokes. On his way out, Dr. Winslow passed Nurse Barnes, and I managed to raise my shoulders and head, gripping the water cup with both hands while I tried to drink it. Most of it went down my throat, but some soaked into my gown. At least now I could try to speak without my tongue sticking to the insides of my mouth.
Across the hall, a man was cussing up a wild streak, stringing words together in new ways I hadn't never heard before, and a few I had. First, there was filthy names of private body parts in the same sentence with words like suck and shove, or combinations of "Jesus H," then a foul word between, followed by "Christ." I didn't never like it when somebody used the Lord's name that a-way.
Next there was a loud crash, like as if somebody kicked a wheeled cart and all the items on it shattered to the floor.
I reckoned that man must be crazy.
When they finally got the noisy man to quiet down, I waited while Dr. Stokes pulled up a chair next to the bed. "Helen, we understand you had a bad dream."
The dream was now just a far away memory. A trifling memory like dozens of times before. Dr. Winslow knows all about my dream, but I hadn't never told it yet to Dr. Stokes. Course, there's some things neither one of the doctors knows, like how me and Violet worked at the Radium Dial factory.
"We're going to try some new medication," Dr. Stokes said, "so you'll sleep better and we can eliminate some of those disturbing images."
I nodded, recollecting images I seen over the years. When I was a young girl, sometimes I might see a kind of cloud around a person's head. A soft cloud with blurry edges to it. One time, I seen a cloud around a old woman's head. One other time, I seen it around a boy's head we used to go swimming with in the pond back in Belmont. His name was Jerrod. Me and Jerrod looked like we was twins, even though we wasn't. We was sad to learn just a few weeks after the start of summer he come down with the diphtheria. He died before he was nine.
I chewed on my lower lip, reaching for the sleeve of the doctor's white coat. "I... I don't want to leave Mannington. Please don't make me go live with Pearl."
Dr. Stokes smiled and patted me on my arm. "Let's not worry about that now, Helen. We'll see you tomorrow in our session, and we can discuss it then, okay?"
I let out a breath, and told him it would be fine. Whenever I was worried, Dr. Winslow always had a way to make me feel better, by talking real gentle to me. Dr. Stokes most likely would do the same. Also, Dr. Stokes has got him a sense of humor. One time, he come in to see me and my roommate Neely, wearing a funny straw hat that could light up like a Christmas light.
I cracked a smile for him, because I knowed they would soon return me to my room. I knowed we could talk about me going to live with my niece Pearl at our session in the morning. The first time Pearl mentioned the idea, she said right in front of me, "It's embarrassing to have a relative up there at Mannington." Plus, the doctors are sending lots of folks home now, specially the ones who aren't so bad off.
When Pearl was a little girl, things was different. I brought her up. Now that Pearl is forty-three and has her that personnel job in Gastonia, she thinks she knows everthing. If I do go live with her, she will probably make me feel as if I'm a great big burden.
Oh, I know all about burdens. Keeping a secret hid is a kind of burden, and I've kept plenty of those since I was young. Things I never told nobody but my husband, and he's been gone years.
Thinking about Pearl has stirred up some memories from that 1923 summer when me and Violet lied to our daddy. Memories about the first girls who died from the radium, like Bess and some of the others. About how they was so sick, I didn't want to visit them.
Nobody can make me talk if I don't want to. I hold fast to my secrets, specially the ones me and Violet and Clara Jane promised never to tell.