Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  “Did you know,” Pierre crouched down to tell the children, once we could not walk any farther through the crowd, “eighty men entered this race nineteen days ago, and now at the end only twenty-four are still in it. Twenty-five-hundred kilometers these men have bicycled. In nineteen days!”

  Lou’s eyes widened. “That’s over one hundred and thirty kilometers on a bicycle every single day,” she said. I smiled, pleased by her quick math skills. “May I take Jakub closer to the front so we can see the bicycles better, ciotka?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I told her. “Just continue to keep a close watch on him. We’ll wait back here.”

  Lou and Jakub squeezed through the adults and got up closer to the street. My eyes followed them, and I laughed a little watching them squirm through child-size spaces up to the front of the crowd.

  “I always thought I would have children of my own,” Pierre said, wistfully, and in that way he had of saying whatever it was that came to his mind whether it was entirely appropriate or not. It was one of the reasons why I liked spending time with him. His unadulterated honesty.

  It also made me feel I could be completely honest back, and that he would not judge me or blame me, but he would just listen. “I never knew how much I wanted children,” I told him. “Until I lost a baby a few years ago.”

  “Oh,” Pierre said, casting his eyes down. “I’m very sorry, Marya. I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know.”

  “It’s all right. How could you?” I shrugged, and tears that I didn’t realize I still had for baby Zosia welled up in my eyes. I blinked them back, willing them not to spill over. I did not wish to make a scene, right here on the street in the middle of this crowd.

  Pierre stared at me for a moment, then shifted his eyes away, straining his neck to catch a glimpse of the children up ahead. “I suppose I always imagined I’d be married by now, too,” he said. “Jacques was the one who said he’d be content to be a bachelor forever, not me. And look, even he is getting married.” Pierre let out a dry laugh.

  “And why aren’t you married?” I asked him. Surely a man like him: handsome, intelligent, well-off, could marry his pick of women in France, even if his head were in the clouds, as Hela had said.

  “I loved a woman once, many years ago. And then she died, and it almost ruined me,” he said. “I suppose I never wanted to let myself feel like that again, and for a long while I wouldn’t even consider falling in love.”

  “Well, it’s not too late,” I told him.

  He looked back up, smiled at me. “And for you, too,” he said. I supposed he meant it was not too late for me to have a child of my own, but I had this strange feeling he was really saying something else, something more. Something I shouldn’t want him to.

  “My husband betrayed me,” I said, speaking the truth out loud for the first time. “I sacrificed my dream of an education in Paris for a life with him in Poland, and then he betrayed me. With my closest friend. They both betrayed me.” I paused, blinking back those tears that really wanted to roll down my face now. “That’s why I’ve been here for so long, all by myself. I had to figure out how I’m supposed to feel, what I’m supposed to do next.”

  “And have you?” Pierre asked. “Figured anything out?”

  I couldn’t hold the tears back any longer, and I felt them rolling down my cheeks, but I didn’t move to wipe them away. Through the blur, I saw the racers approach, the bicycles a swirl of green and yellow and blue as they whizzed by us. “I don’t know,” I finally said. Hela would be married in a few days, and then everyone would expect me to return home to Poland, to return home to Kaz and to my old life. I had thought that time, that distance, would soften the blow of his betrayal. But it hadn’t. “I really don’t know.”

  Pierre reached his hand out, grabbed mine, interlaced our fingers and squeezed gently. I squeezed back, and my body turned warmer from the nearness of him. “Your husband is an imbécile,” he said.

  IT WAS NEARLY DARK BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED BACK AT BRONIA’S. Jakub fell asleep on my shoulder on the omnibus, and Pierre lifted him off of me, carried him across his shoulder up to the house. My arm was still numb from the weight of my nephew, and now Lou clung to it as we walked up the steps. I watched Pierre holding on so gently to Jakub, and his tenderness for my nephew made me smile.

  Lou let go of me and ran ahead to open the door for Pierre. I felt an ache in my chest for him, as I watched him carry Jakub up the stairs. He should be someone’s father. Someone’s husband.

  “Marya.” Bronia’s voice startled me, and I turned.

  Then another voice, from behind her: “Kochanie, is that you?” Kaz stepped out of the dining room. My face flamed red, as if I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t have. I put my hands to my cheeks.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I asked him to come,” Bronia said. And it didn’t make any sense to me. Why would she do that? Had my sister-mother betrayed me too? But how could she, when I hadn’t even told her the truth about what had happened between us. “You’re in denial about your condition,” Bronia said.

  “My condition?”

  Kaz walked closer, put his hands on my shoulders, then pulled me toward him, embraced me tightly. He kissed the top of my head, and though I didn’t want it to, my body relaxed against his. In spite of myself, I had missed him. “I would not miss your sister’s wedding,” he said gently in my ear, stroking back my disheveled hair with his hands.

  I heard the sounds of Pierre’s footsteps, coming down the stairs with Lou, two at a time. Lou laughed a little, and I jumped back. Pierre saw Kaz, then met my eyes and frowned.

  “Kazimierz,” Bronia said. “This is Pierre Curie. Jacques’s younger brother.”

  Kaz stepped forward and they shook hands. Pierre was still frowning; Kaz shook his head a little, seeming confused by Pierre’s expression. I bit my tongue.

  “Pierre,” Bronia said. “It is late and a long way back. You should get going.”

  “Yes, of course,” Pierre murmured, his eyes still on me as he tipped his hat, walked out. I looked away, my face flaming hot again.

  Kaz put his hand on my stomach, flattened his palm against me, holding still. “Kochanie,” he said again. “A baby?”

  A baby? I laughed a little, glanced at Bronia, who stared back at me tight-lipped, serious.

  “Marya,” she said, her frown creasing deeper. “You have been riding that silly bicycle around La Villette, your head in the clouds. Somebody needs to help you face the truth.”

  My head in the clouds. It was the same way Hela described Pierre. And for a moment I thought about our conversation earlier, about the way his hand had felt holding mine, about the way everything had felt a little easier when it was just between the two of us.

  “The truth?” I questioned Bronia, though somewhere inside of me, I felt a new red-hot terror rising through my veins, pooling in my stomach, nausea hitting me quickly again.

  BRONIA PUT HER STETHOSCOPE TO MY EARS, UNBUTTONED A button on my dress, and put the cold end against my belly. She implored me to listen to the sounds that she was positive would come through. I heard them, a steady thump, thump, thump. But even then, I told her it was not proof of anything. What about the doctor who said my body could not hold on to a baby, deliver it into the world, living?

  Kaz took the stethoscope for his own ears. Then, after he heard the sounds too, he exclaimed: “A baby!” His face erupted with a joy I hadn’t seen in him since we were very young, and so in love, and I felt it sharply inside my own chest, an ache, a wanting.

  He kneeled down on the ground, kissed my belly. I wanted to continue to be mad at him. I wanted to insist that I had all I needed right here in Paris, on my own. I wanted to stay with my head in the clouds and my feet on the bicycle pedals on the cobblestone streets of La Villette. But there was a heartbeat inside of me, and suddenly that was more important than anything I needed or I wanted.

  The day after Hela’s wedding, Kaz a
nd I took the long journey back to Poland, together.

  Marie

  France, 1904

  Pierre’s magical heart is right. 1904 changes us.

  For one thing, from the very start of the year, there is the money. Seventy thousand francs from Sweden, and more from England for the Davy prize. We install a modern bathroom in our house, and I send twenty thousand Austrian crowns to Bronia and Mier to help with their sanatorium in Zakopane, and also gifts to Hela in Warsaw and Jacques in Montpellier.

  Bronia writes to thank me for the money, and I suppose it is strange the way neither one of us mentions this cloud that still hangs over us, the darkness that continues to embrace us, or the way that money, even money, which we have needed and needed for so very long, does nothing to ease that. Jakub and Val are still dead. It is almost hard to remember a time back in Szczuki and in Warsaw when I believed that, if only I had money, surely happiness and everything else I ever wanted would follow.

  Then with our new money comes more money: Pierre is finally admitted into the Academy and hired as a professor at the Sorbonne. So we have not only our prize money but his steady and good salary. And we can, for the first time, afford to hire a research assistant for our lab.

  But strangest of all is our new notoriety, our sudden fame. The press clamors on boulevard Kellerman outside our home, snapping photos of us as we leave for the lab in the morning. Jeanne Langevin makes her way through the garden, into my kitchen, to complain how they are waking her baby with their noise and disturbing the entire street. Paul walks in behind her, shushing her, saying, It is not their fault the press won’t leave them alone.

  “Believe me,” I tell Jeanne, throwing my hands up in the air in annoyance. “I do not want them here. I cannot make them stop.”

  We go to work, but then there is another bunch of them waiting for us at the lab, shouting at us to grant them an interview, to answer their questions. I begin receiving fan letters in the mail, and hundreds of requests for autographs. I throw them all away, unanswered. Or else I would spend my entire day wasted, signing my name instead of continuing with my work.

  “They are enamored of you,” Pierre says with a chuckle, as if it tickles him. “The first woman to win a Nobel Prize.”

  But it is not me they want exactly, it is us. They want to write us a great romantic love story. And when we refuse to grant interviews, they write their stories anyway. I am a genius and great light to my husband, or I am a shackle to my husband’s genius and his success, depending on where the story is printed, who has written it. No one cares that it was my idea to extract the radium. No one cares that I was born poor and Polish. One of the dailies calls me France’s Greatest Living Gem. Another one makes up a quote of me saying that everything I do, it is in deference to my great husband.

  “Perhaps we should just grant a few interviews,” Pierre says. “They might realize how dreadfully hard and tedious our work is and leave us alone.”

  “It would be a waste of our time,” I say. “Let them write whatever they like. What do I care?”

  Pierre has his classes at the Sorbonne to prepare for now, and I still have my classes to teach at the girls’ school in Sèvres. And there is so much more to be done in the lab. We are trying to assess the atomic weight of radium, and in the bustle of everything, we have mistakenly misplaced some materials; we are dreadfully behind. The committee in Sweden gave us only six months to come in person to make our acceptance speech, but Pierre has been struck with his most violent attack of rheumatism yet, and neither one of us can imagine making the journey to Sweden in that time frame.

  When spring semester ends, Pierre and I are both aching and exhausted, and who cares that we have money now? Happiness feels so far out of our reach.

  But Pierre has an idea. He has found us a secluded little cottage to rent in Saint-Rémy to while away the first month of summer. “The press will never find us there,” he tells me, with a satisfied grin. “And we can, at long last, get some rest.”

  I GO BAREFOOT IN SAINT-RÉMY IN JUNE, OR SOMETIMES I wear sandals when we take the bicycles out and ride through the pastures, to Lac du Peiroou. And then, even though the water is freezing, Pierre insists on a swim, while I am content to dip my toes in at the edge.

  Away from the city, Irène wiles away the days with her grand-père, and Pierre and I spend the days together, devoid of responsibilities. Pierre’s leg pains ease, and without the constant buzz and hum of the reporters, I should be able to breathe a little easier here too. But for some reason, I can’t. We have promised each other to clear our minds of work for the few weeks that we are here. We want to revel in the country air and Irène and each other. And it is only then, only after a week away, that I realize the truth of it: the tiredness, my aching body, my nausea, even all the way out here. I am pregnant again. For heaven’s sakes, how had I missed this in Paris? I count back . . . I must already be a few months along.

  The realization should buoy me, but instead it sinks me, like I’ve dived into the cold waters of the lake and I can barely breathe.

  I whisper my revelation to Pierre in the darkness of our bed that night.

  He lowers his face to my belly, kisses me softly. I can feel the warmth of his lips, even through the fabric of my nightgown.

  “I am terrified,” I admit to him. I think about last time, how the baby came much too soon, only five months along. Not a boy at all as Pierre had felt but a girl, perfectly formed, only born before she could breathe.

  “No, mon amour,” Pierre whispers into my belly, his words tickling the fibers of my gown against my skin. “Everything is going to be exactly right this time, I can feel it.”

  THE NEXT MORNING I AWAKE BEFORE DAWN. PIERRE IS ACTUALLY asleep, snoring softly beside me. His pains and his mind calm enough to rest out here.

  I get up and dress in an old smock I’d brought for bike riding, and I go outside to take a walk to the lake. The sun rises, and the sky turns pink and purple. The world feels beautiful here, like a world that will never harm us again, and I inhale, letting the warm country air wash over me.

  “Excuse me,” a young man calls out to me, and as I do not recognize him, I keep on walking. “Excuse me, Madame,” he calls out again, his French racked with a terrible American accent. I stop if only to get him to leave me alone. I need quiet. I need time for my mind to absorb what my body already understands. Six more months of worry and waiting and aching, and then if the world spins exactly as it should, and if there are no more accidents of science, another baby. Another baby. “I’ve heard the Curies are staying here for a holiday,” the man says. “Have you seen them? I hear they like to ride bicycles along here, and I’d really like to catch them for an interview.”

  I reach up to touch my hair. It’s out of its usual bun, as I haven’t taken the time this morning. My feet are bare, and my smock is old and torn and ragged. He has no idea who I am, and somehow that thought gives me strength to remember exactly who I am. “I haven’t seen them,” I say. “You must be mistaken.”

  I walk back toward the cottage, a smile creeping across my face. Saint-Rémy is otherworldly and strangely magical, and when I find Pierre in the cottage preparing breakfast I tell him that I think if we can just stay here forever everything is going to turn out okay.

  His eyes light up, and he embraces me. And for just a moment, I can breathe again.

  BUT WE CANNOT STAY IN SAINT-RÉMY. OUR LAB CALLS TO US, and we have classes to teach. In the fall we are back in Paris, but I am so heavy with the baby and exhaustion and worry that I take a short leave from teaching my classes in Sèvres. Still, every day, I am in the lab, working. The months go slowly: four, then five, then six, then seven. Each one like an experiment. I hold my breath to see if I will make it through, if the results will be good.

  In the middle of November, Bronia shows up at our door one evening, unannounced. She is paler than I remember her; thinner. Zakopane has not been as kind to her as I would’ve expected, once. Not Zakopane, though. L
ife. And death.

  “Moja mała siostrzyczka,” she says, embracing me. Her Polish shocks me. It has been too long since I have heard it regularly, since I have spoken it. “I did not want you to have this baby without me,” she says. She puts her hand on my belly, doctor and sister-mother. But maybe Bronia needs a sister-mother too. I wonder if she is here to see for herself that good things can happen to us, too, that children can live still, even once we have seen them die. Or maybe she is here because she is worried it will happen again, and she knows I cannot survive it another time, on my own.

  I cling to her, so happy she is here, no matter what her reason. “Everything is terrible,” I admit to her in a way I can’t admit to Pierre. His leg pains have returned even worse since the summer, and he is busy with his students. And he is worried how much longer we can put off a trip to Sweden, and with writing the Academy to buy us more time. To him the baby will happen, it will come when it is ready, and everything will turn out fine this time. I cannot burden him with my own dread, with my worry. But Bronia. She is a different story. “Everything is darkness,” I tell her.

  “I knew you needed me,” she replies, more to herself than to me.

  BY THE BEGINNING OF DECEMBER, THE WEATHER HAS GROWN cool and my body is so heavy, the baby so large, pushing up into my chest, that I can barely breathe. And anyway, I hold my breath still, waiting, waiting, not daring to believe this baby is real. Refusing to name the baby or love it or imagine holding it. Even when the labor pains begin and drag on and on through the night. Even then, I do not allow myself to believe.

  It is not until she comes out wailing and Bronia places her on my chest that I understand that she is real, that she is alive. And even then my body is overcome with pain. I’m numb with it, and I can’t quite believe. She comes out chubby and with a head of black hair, looking nothing like slender Irène with her pale hair. Is she really mine?