Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  She looked away from me, off toward the Baltic again. Neither one of us spoke for a few more moments. And then she cleared her throat and said it, what she had brought me here to say all along: “Kazimierz is young still. It is not too late for him to be happy.”

  I nodded, agreeing with that much. Kaz would finish his education, eventually. He would get a better job and we would move into a nicer apartment, and even if my body continued to betray me, my mind never would, and I would continue to learn any way and as much as I was able.

  “My husband knows a priest who would be willing to annul your marriage, given what . . . happened last summer.”

  The distant buzzing finally stopped; her words were sharp and perfectly clear. I felt a stabbing pain in my stomach, a phantom pain, the ache of my empty womb, my beautiful blue Zosia. Annul the marriage?

  “In exchange, we would be willing to give you the money you need to move to Paris, attend university like you’ve always dreamed. Or, you don’t even have to attend university—you can take the tuition money and do whatever you wish with it. You could start over, too, close to your sisters.” She was still talking.

  I stared at her, unable to speak. I loved Kaz. I would always love Kaz. But could another woman, a woman his mother approved of, give him everything I couldn’t? He could have the education he desired, along with his family’s love, his family’s money, and perhaps, most of all, his own child.

  And Paris. Pursuing my education there had been my dream for so very long. But I put my hand on my empty stomach now and wondered if that was really what I still desired most.

  “Matka!” Kaz’s voice pierced the room, and I jumped. I turned around, and there he stood at the doorway, his face now bright red with distress, not joy. I wondered how much he had heard. I guessed, everything.

  I moved to stand, to go to him, but Pani Zorawska was quicker than me. She got to him first, put her wrinkled hand to his cheek. “I just want what’s best for you, kochanie. That is all. That is all I’ve ever wanted.”

  He reached up, removed her hand from his cheek, and walked to me swiftly, in two large strides. “Marya,” he said. “I think it is time for us to go home.”

  “But you just got here,” Pani Zorawska cried out.

  LATER, ON THE TRAIN BACK TO LOKSOW, KAZ RESTED HIS face against the window, watching the devious blue Baltic drift away behind us. His expression was stony, resolute, and I could not tell if he was sad or angry. I reached for his hand, and when he took my hand, covered it with his own, squeezed gently, I felt myself exhale for the first time. I leaned my head back against the seat and closed my eyes. The lull of the train, the warmth of my husband, made me feel so very tired.

  “What were you going to say, kochanie?” he said softly.

  “Hmmm?” I murmured, on the brink of sleep.

  “To Matka. When she offered you that money to leave me?”

  I sat up and opened my eyes. Suddenly the rocking of the train made me feel nauseated, not relaxed. “I was going to say no, of course,” I said quickly. I moved my hand up to Kaz’s face, traced his jawline with my finger. “I love you. You know that.”

  His expression relaxed, and he put his arm around me, pulled me closer to him, kissed the top of my head. I leaned my head against his shoulder, closed my eyes again.

  I did love him, but deep down I worried that Pani Zorawska was right. That she had always been right. And the truth was, I wasn’t sure what I really would have said to her, had he not walked out onto the sun porch when he had.

  Marie

  Paris, France, 1898

  I am so focused on the pitchblende that I have not even heard Pierre walk into our lab, and when he says my name, I jump, nearly hitting my head on the wooden grocery crates we’d used to construct our ionization chamber a few weeks ago.

  In the past weeks, I have decided to look further into Henri Becquerel’s research on uranium compounds, and Pierre and I acquired a large ore sample, pitchblende from Bohemia, and built our own little rickety ionization chamber for testing. At present, I am so caught up in the peculiar readings coming out of the chamber that Pierre’s voice barely even registers with me.

  “Marie,” he says again, a little louder.

  “This can’t be right,” I say to him, no time for pleasantries, or to ask where he has been or what he wants of me now. I put the pitchblende back into the chamber. It is heavy and has a terrible dirty smell, and I am sweating, breathing hard. But I must test it again. My reading shows the radioactivity is so much greater than in uranium alone. But if it is right . . . then I have discovered something new. Something different. Something no scientist before me has found, and at that thought, my hands begin to tremble.

  Pierre reaches out to steady them in his own. “Deep breath, mon amour,” he says, his voice softening, his face arched into a deep frown. Then, “I need to tell you something.”

  I turn my attention fully to him finally, alarmed. “Is it Irène? Is she sick?”

  “No, no. It’s not Irène at all. I’ve just received word . . . I didn’t get the professorship at the Sorbonne.”

  Pierre had applied for a vacancy in the science department, and he had gotten the highest recommendation from the esteemed Monsieur Friedel, a brilliant chemist who’d mentored him and his brother, Jacques, with some of their earliest experiments. Jacques had gone on to become a professor of mineralogy in Montpellier on his recommendation. We’d felt certain Pierre would get the position here, and with it would come a higher-paying salary and better lab space, which would allow me to focus on my doctoral studies.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t get it?” The words erupt from me in disbelief. I’m still sweating from the exertion of my experiment, my breath ragged in my chest. “No one else who applied is more qualified than you.”

  “They gave it to Monsieur Perrin,” Pierre says quietly. He has already taken a moment to digest the news before sharing it with me; he’s already accepted it.

  I shake my head. Of course they did. Jean Perrin is younger, but with a fancier degree, from one of the grandes écoles.

  “Oh darling.” I reach up and touch his cheek, stroke his beard softly. My fingers are filthy from the pitchblende, but it’s not something Pierre will notice, nor care about. I’ll have to remind him to wash it away later. “Everything will turn out all right. You’ll see.”

  Pierre sighs; he’s not sure he believes me. His mother passed away just two weeks after Irène was born, and he has been swimming slowly through his grief ever since. I have left Pierre’s father in charge of looking after Irène, and that has helped Dr. Curie immensely. It brings him such joy to care for her, and for me, so little worry. I can fully concentrate on my work again. But Pierre is struggling, having trouble focusing, even asking me to attend séances with him, of all things.

  I see it in his eyes sometimes still now, months later, that vacant look he gets as he stares off into the distance or loses his train of thought, midsentence. Pierre has always been absentminded in his brilliance, but lately he has been almost beyond distraction. I had truly believed he would get this job and it would bring him out of his darkness, bring him completely back to science and the world again.

  “Well, who cares about them,” I finally say. “I’m going to need your help with my pitchblende anyway.”

  He laughs a little, shakes his head. “What could you possibly need my help for? You have it all under control here, mon amour.”

  And then I tell him about my peculiar readings of the degrees of radiation this morning, and that, if I can duplicate it, if it was not wrong, there is so much more to Becquerel’s research and the pitchblende itself than any of us had ever dreamed, even me. That I might have just discovered an entirely new element, inside our tiny, rickety laboratory and our grocery carton ionization chamber. That I may be onto something so new, so very exciting.

  Pierre cuts me off. “You are on the brink of something brilliant. I can feel it.” His voice is wild. “Maybe you will need
me, to be your assistant, help rush your findings out to the Academy.”

  “Yes, darling, I will need you for all of that. But first we have to replicate my results with the pitchblende. Make sure I haven’t simply made a mistake.”

  “You? Make a mistake?” He laughs and shakes his head. His eyes finally brim with something other than loss, the excitement I feel too, the excitement that shakes my entire being. And then, buoyed by his belief in me, I stand up on my toes and kiss him softly.

  IT ALL HAPPENS QUITE FAST, AND IN A MATTER OF DAYS, I AM certain there are two new elements in the pitchblende based on the levels of radioactivity in my testing. I name the first element polonium after my native Poland, the second radium, for its greater radioactivity. We are in a frenzied rush to write up the paper, because once we understand what we have found, we worry someone else will write it up first. We get the paper to the French Academy of Sciences, trusting Monsieur Lippman to present it on our behalf, as the Academy will not accept Pierre nor I as members yet. And when the Academy responds, they remark with interest, but they say we do not have enough evidence. To truly prove this, we will have to actually isolate these elements from the pitchblende.

  “Impossible,” Pierre says, shaking his head. “It would take years and . . . a ton of pitchblende.”

  “Difficult, yes.” I agree. “But not impossible.” We will do it ourselves, I tell him. We will chemically wash away at the rock, little by little, piece by piece, grueling and disgusting work. But we will do it and we will isolate the new elements, if only to prove them all wrong. If only to prove that we can. If only to earn our own place in the Academy.

  “YOU LOOK QUITE TIRED,” BRONIA SAYS TO ME, A MONTH later. She and Lou have come over on Sunday to teach me how to make jam. I’ve spent the entire last week in the lab, using chemicals on the pitchblende. My fingertips are raw, my nail beds ugly and scabbed. “Are you ill?” Bronia asks, putting her hand on my forehead. It doesn’t matter that I am a mother myself, an accomplished scientist. She will always be my sister-mother. “Pregnant again?” she asks.

  I shake my head. The truth is, I feel more exhausted than I’ve felt in my entire life, worse even than in my terrible condition with Irène. It is grueling and tedious work we are doing in the lab now. And though today it is Sunday, my day of rest, I cannot shake the tiredness, the ache of the work. Pierre, similarly exhausted, has decided to spend the entire day in bed. My fingers ache, my eyes burn. But I’d extended this invitation to Bronia weeks ago, and she has brought little Lou over, and I cannot disappoint them.

  “Where’s Irène?” Bronia asks now, looking around the kitchen.

  “Dr. Curie took her to the park,” I say.

  Bronia frowns, but Irène is too young to understand jam making yet, and I am too tired to keep her from making a mess. When Dr. Curie offered the park, I’d gratefully accepted.

  Bronia is an expert at jam making, having learned from our mother before she died. It is her reward for being older than me, more time with Mama. And I envy her ease now. I wish I could be more wifely, more motherly, like my sister, but it does not come naturally to me the way it does to her. Bronia can somehow manage to be all things: mother, wife, sister, doctor, and still never look tired. I imagine if I can just master jam making, I will master everything else as well.

  “All right then, eight pounds of gooseberries,” Bronia says now, recording her recipe in my household journal in her neat and perfect script as she speaks. “And an equal amount of crystalized sugar.”

  There it is, like an equation. And making jam, being wifely, cannot be so hard if you treat it just like this, just like science, can it? My kitchen is my laboratory, the gooseberries my minerals. I squash them beneath my fingertips, the warm juices running down my aching fingers.

  Lou mashes the berries with me, and the sound of her little girl giggle, the feeling of the fruit on my fingers is relaxing, and I close my eyes and let the process soothe me. Perhaps when Irène is a little older, we will do this together, too. And I understand now why Bronia enjoys this. For a moment I almost don’t realize Bronia is still talking to me. “. . . back to Poland,” she says.

  “What?” I open my eyes, remove my hands from the berries. My fingers are stained red, as if I’m bleeding.

  “Zakopane,” she says. “Mier and I are building a sanatorium there to live and work at, and when it’s finished next year, we will finally return back to Poland.” Her face has softened, her smile is wider than I’ve seen it in recent memory. Zakopane is a small country town at the base of the Tatras, in Austrian Poland, out of the Russian Empire, so Mier will be safe from prosecution. But Bronia will be back in Poland, only hours on the train from Warsaw, not days.

  “Oh, Bron,” I say. “How wonderful for you.”

  And something curls up in my chest: I’m not exactly sure what. It is jealousy mixed with a little bit of sadness, or, maybe it is pride, that my sister-mother has achieved her dream of becoming a doctor, and now she will go back to our homeland and help people there. Maybe one day, once we complete our research here, Pierre and Irène and I will be able to follow her.

  Marya

  Poland, 1901

  Papa was sixty-eight years old, and his letters to me were getting noticeably shorter, the time between each one noticeably longer. The gap widened from one to two weeks, then three. When it had been an entire month without one, I got worried and told Kaz I was taking the train to Warsaw the following day to check on him. “Do you want to come?” I asked him, knowing full well that he couldn’t.

  “I wish I could, kochanie,” he said. And I nodded. I understood. I did. He had his work with Hipolit—he was assisting him with new research on elasticity, and Hipolit, too, was getting older. Kaz told me he felt like a vital part of Hipolit’s research, recording notes when Hipolit forgot, making sure all the data was in order in the way the older man could not keep up with. And now instead of simply mentoring him, Hipolit was paying Kaz to be his research assistant. Kaz made twice as much money as he used to, which was a relief and a joy to him—to be paid to study mathematics!

  The Kaminksi twins had gone away to boarding school in Krakow last fall, so I was no longer needed in my full-time position there. In the time since, I’d learned how to breathe again, and I began to focus on teaching, my university. In the past few months, free from my governess duties, I realized if I made my Flying University into something real, something a little larger, the women who’d first started in it with me could all teach new women just joining, younger than us. We could begin to charge a small tuition fee to pay those of us who taught. If I were able to pay myself a salary that way, I would not ever need to get another governess job. And besides, I would be growing education for women in Loksow, and that would be a wonderful thing. A thing that filled me with enormous pride.

  “But I hate for you to travel alone . . . I wish . . .” Kaz was still talking about my trip now. I knew exactly what he wished. That I would wait, at least until Sunday when he would be able to accompany me on the train ride, but I knew he would not ask me that now either, not when I was so worried about Papa’s well-being, and today was only Monday. He began to speak, then hesitated.

  “Kaz, I am a grown woman. I have made the trip many times before. I’ll be fine.”

  “But that was . . . before.”

  Three weeks ago, there had been a pounding on our door during a Wednesday night class—two military police claiming they had gotten word of illegal activity here. Luckily I’d only had a few women in attendance that night—two hid under the bed, one in the closet, and then Leokadia and I had hastily wrapped ourselves in aprons before answering the door. Leokadia had thought fast, had used her moneyed charm to regale the policemen with a story about the preserves we were trying to can, a disaster that had happened with the fruit, and how we were trying so hard to learn, to please our husbands. Luckily they had not asked to actually see our nonexistent preserves. Her explanation, and her charm, had satisfied the policemen
enough for them to leave. I had not recounted the incident to Kaz, and if he knew about it now, it would only be because Leokadia had told him while he was at work. Had she?

  He stared at me now, his eyes wide, concerned, and I wondered if he was envisioning the Russian police pulling me off the train. “Kaz, really, I’ll be just fine.”

  “What if you take Leokadia with you?” he suggested. “Then you wouldn’t have to go alone.”

  “I’m sure she has better things to do.”

  Kaz shook his head. “No, she was just telling me how she would like to get out of the house more, have an adventure.” Leokadia still played piano all around the Russian Empire of Poland, but she had not been invited back to Krakow in years and had told me how she longed to move away, somewhere freer, somewhere she could be paid to play and free to study at a real conservatory. So why did it bother me that she had told Kaz much the same?

  I had this strange creeping sensation on the back of my neck, and I reached my hand up to try and rub it away. “Going to Papa’s with me in Warsaw is not much of an adventure,” I finally said.

  “Please,” Kaz begged me. “Just ask her if she’ll ride the train with you. I’ll come and check in on you both on the weekend.”

  I relented. Because the truth was I was worried what I would find at Papa’s, and going there with a friend, not having to face it alone, actually didn’t sound like the worst idea.

  LEOKADIA AND I DIDN’T SPEAK MUCH ON THE TRAIN RIDE. WE left early in the morning, and we were both tired, but something else was nagging at me too. Kaz thought he knew so much about what she wanted, and it was something I wanted to be angry with her for. But then, what right did I have? She and her father had done nothing but help Kaz, and by extension, me, and I should feel grateful. And so I pressed my lips tightly together, saying nothing at all.

  Leokadia mistook my silence for worry about Papa, and as the train arrived in Warsaw, she patted my arm and said, “Marya, I’m sure everything is fine, and maybe he has just been busy?”