Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  “She’s okay?” I say to Pierre when he comes in to see her, more a question than a statement.

  She is still wailing, and Pierre lifts her from my chest, holds her close, and kisses her black swath of hair. “She is perfect,” Pierre says softly. “Should we name her after your father?”

  “No, no,” I say. “She needs a new name. A beautiful, fresh French name.” I am done with darkness. I am done with death hovering, marking us and taking away our happiness.

  “I like Ève,” Pierre says after a little while.

  “Ève,” I repeat. A beginning.

  Marya

  Loksow, Poland, 1904

  My Klara was a wonderful baby. She came into the world blond-haired and blue-eyed, bright pink and wailing. And then, she hardly ever cried, she was a good sleeper, and she was content to observe everything around her without much fussing, even when I began taking her with me to my university courses again in January. I wore her in a wrap across my chest, her heart beating close to mine, and I swore she was already listening, already learning, already feeling the heartbeats of my chemistry lessons.

  I had returned to our apartment on Złota Street last August and picked up my life again as if I’d never left it all for a few months away in France. The remainder of my pregnancy felt long and filled with so much worry, but Klara was born perfect in November of 1903, and I was filled with a lightness I’d never known before. My love for my daughter was a different kind of love than I had ever felt, than I had ever imagined.

  Kaz and I did not discuss what had happened between him and Leokadia, but before we left Paris, I forced myself to read all the letters he’d sent to me. They were filled with apologies, and promises. He swore he made a mistake, only once. He blamed what had happened on his sadness over losing baby Zosia. And then, how in the ensuing months, he believed I had lost myself. Which made him feel he had lost me too. It was hard to read that part, because the truth of it stung. I had lost myself, hadn’t I? Yes, I had nearly drowned, but instead of pulling me out, pulling me up, Kaz had turned to my closest friend.

  Kaz promised he would never talk to Leokadia again. But by the time I came back to Poland, Leokadia was already gone.

  Agata, not Kaz, told me that Leokadia had packed up one day last summer and moved to Berlin to study with a renowned pianist. And even Agata didn’t seem to understand why she had left when she had, so suddenly, with her father so ill and so against the move that he refused to give her any money for it.

  I shook my head, as if it made no sense to me either. If I pretended whatever had happened between her and Kaz never had, then maybe I could forget it, too. Maybe, in time, it would become hazy enough that I would forgive Kaz, love him the way I used to. “Perhaps she couldn’t deny her talent any longer,” I suggested to Agata, convincing enough in my lie that I almost believed it myself.

  Agata nodded, agreeing that made sense. The irony was, without Leokadia, my life felt much quieter, lonelier. I didn’t want to miss her, but she had been my closest friend in Loksow for many years.

  Sometimes I thought about the life I’d tasted briefly in France, walking through Hela and Jacques’s lab, pedaling through the flowers in Sceaux with Pierre, and I felt a little pang of jealousy for Leokadia, learning and living freely in Berlin now. As a friend I both envied her and felt guilt for my role in making her feel she had to leave. But as Kaz’s wife it was a relief to know she was gone, to know that when he went to Hipolit’s to work each day, he wouldn’t be tempted.

  KLARA TURNED SIX MONTHS OLD AT THE END OF APRIL, AND two days later, Kaz came home from work in the middle of the day and sat down at the table where I was feeding Klara lunch. He rested his cheek on the wood of the table and began to cry.

  “What is it?” I stood up, alarmed. I had never seen Kaz cry before, not even when baby Zosia died. But it had been hard to see anything then, through the fog of my own tears.

  “Hipolit is gone,” he said.

  “Oh.” My heartbeat quickened, and I put my hand to my chest to steady it. The money we lived on now came from the salary that Hipolit paid Kaz to conduct his research. Hipolit had been sick for a while, but somehow in my mind I’d imagined him lingering on and on and on.

  “It was just . . . my parents . . . Hipolit treated me . . .” Kaz shook his head, flooded with grief, not able to finish his thought. But I nodded, I understood. Hipolit was his mentor. Hipolit had taught him and cared for him and nurtured his talent even when his own parents had abandoned him.

  I felt guilty now that my first reaction to the news had not been sadness, but a new, and familiar, worry about money. “Oh, Kaz,” I said gently. No matter that I was still angry with him, I cared for him, too.

  Klara had taken the spoon from my hand while I was paying attention to Kaz, and she chose that moment to test it against the wood of the table, banging it, again, and again, and again, while babbling to herself.

  Kaz pulled the spoon from her hands, abruptly, and her face turned, her eyes welled up with tears. Poland’s happiest baby turned, in an instant, into Poland’s saddest baby. Kaz’s mouth opened. “No, moje dziecko, don’t cry. Papa didn’t mean to upset you.”

  He reached for her quickly, held her against his chest, until her tears stopped. Her heartbeat steadied against his heartbeat, and he kissed the top of her head, gently smoothed back her blond curls with his large fingers.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said to Klara, or Kaz, or to myself. And that was the thing about being a mother, it had made me into a liar. And a good one at that. I forced myself to smile. “Everything is going to be okay.”

  PANI JEWNIEWICZ PUT OFF THE FUNERAL FOR A WEEK, UNTIL Leokadia could make it back from Berlin. The day was rainy and quite cold for April, and it was the first time I ever left Klara. Agata offered to sit with her at the apartment so Kaz and I could both attend the funeral. And though part of me did not want to go, did not want to see Leokadia, I thought about how she had traveled with me to Warsaw when Papa was dying, and I knew I had to be there.

  “Marya.” She smiled when she saw me, reached out to hug me, then stopped herself, put her arms at her sides.

  As much as I wanted to hate her, wanted to be angry with her still, seeing her again I remembered exactly why I loved her. I’d missed my friend, and now here she was, right in front of me. She wore a black dress, but it did not dim the brightness of her rosy cheeks, her piercing blue eyes, her beautiful blond curls swept back tightly in a bun. “I’m very sorry for your loss,” I said. I reached for her, awkwardly patting her shoulders.

  She reached up and grabbed my hand, and she squeezed it. “Marya,” she said my name again. “Can we talk later? I have so much to say to you.”

  I did not want to talk, did not want to hear whatever she had to say. But how could I refuse her at her father’s funeral?

  “IT WAS ONLY ONE TIME,” SHE SAID TO ME LATER THAT AFTERNOON, repeating what Kaz had written. As if that made it hurt any less.

  We had all left the gray and the gloom of the cemetery to return to a lavish feast at the Jewniewiczes’ apartment. Kaz had gone to look through the papers Hipolit had left in his study, and Leokadia cornered me and asked if I would join her out on the balcony. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still steel-colored, the air cool and damp. “Just once,” Leokadia repeated.

  I pressed my lips tightly together, not sure how to respond. What were you supposed to say to a woman who you’d loved as a sister, who had betrayed you? I missed her, and I loved her still. And I hated her.

  “I know that doesn’t make it any better, what I did,” Leokadia said. She walked to the edge of the balcony, leaned on the iron railing, and stared off at the smokestacks, the industry of Loksow, in the distance. “But I wanted you to know,” she said. “I made a terrible mistake, a horrible lapse in judgment. And it never happened again. I would never let it happen again.”

  Part of me wanted to ask her exactly when it had happened, wanted to reimagine where I had been at the time
and how I might have changed things if I had noticed more, paid attention more. What if I had not lost my own self in my grief? What if I had reached for Kaz when we were both hurting, instead of pulling away from him? The other part of me knew it didn’t matter. Nothing could change or undo what had happened now. There was always a choice, and they had both made one. Choices had consequences.

  “Do you love him?” I asked her. I’d asked Kaz the same question once about her, and he’d denied he’d ever loved anyone but me. I still didn’t know if I believed him.

  “He’s your husband,” Leokadia said, a nonanswer.

  “But what if he wasn’t?”

  “I don’t know what you want me to say, Marya,” she said. “I’ve missed you,” she added softly. “I wish I could just . . . take it back.”

  “You can’t,” I said, matter-of-factly. She could no more take back her one night with Kaz than I could take back not getting on that train to Paris so many years ago and choosing to marry Kaz instead.

  She nodded. “I know. But I would, if I could.”

  Would I?

  Now that I had Klara, I could not imagine any path, any choice, that would not lead me to her. And now that Kadi was in Berlin, living her dream, I wondered if she could truly regret any choice she had made that had led her there. “You are happy in Berlin?” I asked her.

  She turned away from the railing, back to face me, her mouth slightly open in surprise. She had been bracing herself, leaning against the iron, girding herself. “Berlin is . . . very nice,” she spoke cautiously, still staring at me. I nodded at her to continue. “I have learned so much and have so many opportunities to perform. That part has been quite wonderful,” she finally said. “I should’ve gone years ago.” She swallowed hard and looked at her boots, the weight of what was unsaid caught in her throat. Her father had died angry with her, and maybe if she had left years ago, he would’ve had a chance to get over it. Or she would’ve come to terms with it herself by now. “I miss Flying University, though,” she said now. “All the wonderful women.”

  I nodded. “Well . . . now that you’re gone, we don’t have anyone teaching music lessons. No one else has the talent for it, you know.”

  “I bet my old piano teacher would do it. I’ll ask her for you.”

  “That would be nice,” I said softly. “Thank you.”

  We stared at each other, so much still left unsaid, but neither one of us said anything for another moment. “If I wrote you letters from Berlin, do you think you might write me back?” she finally asked me. “I practice all day, and I barely know anyone still. It gets lonely.”

  “Klara keeps me very busy,” I said quickly.

  “Klara.” She smiled, and though I supposed she knew I’d had a baby—her mother must’ve relayed that detail—she hadn’t known her name until now. “That’s a beautiful name,” she said.

  “Kaz wanted to call her Kazimiera, but that’s his mother’s name, and I said absolutely not. I didn’t think she should be Marya either. I wanted her to have her own name, be her own person, so Klara seemed a combination of both of us and that too.”

  “It’s perfect.” Leokadia smiled, then added, “I will send you letters, and you will write back if you have the time?”

  I thought about what she was asking. “I suppose I will write back,” I finally said. “If I have the time.”

  Later that night, after Klara fell asleep, Kaz was restless in our bed, tossing and turning and pulling the sheets off of me. I put my hand on his arm to stop him from rolling, to steady him, and he reached up and grabbed my fingers, held on to me. He stopped moving, and for a few seconds we lay there touching.

  “I don’t know what I’m going to do now,” he said. “He’s gone, and he left no money to continue his research.”

  It was hard to breathe for a moment in the darkness, and then I thought of Klara sleeping in the next room, and I forced myself to. Inhale, exhale. I thought about Hela and Jacques in their lab, about Pierre, who Hela said had done many studies with very little results, and how that was what prevented him from being hired. But Kaz had done so much work already, had so many results. Kaz did not have his head in the clouds; he was steady, practical. “You have all the elasticity research,” I said. “You’re going to publish it, and then you’re going to get a job in a lab or at a university. And we are going to be fine. We are going to be just fine.”

  Marie

  Sweden & Brittany, 1905

  We finally make it to Stockholm to give our acceptance speech in June of 1905, and we are both feeling well and happy at last. This city is so beautiful and calm in the summer—no one from the press even realizes we are here! And I cannot have a bad thought about the world, even if I might still be inclined to.

  All around us there is the bluest water and quaintest red roofs, and though we have been dreading and worrying about this journey for so long, now that we are here it feels like a holiday. Pierre and I hold hands as we walk along the river path in the beautiful, flowering Djurgården the afternoon before Pierre is to give his speech.

  Though we have written the speech together, wanting to focus on the way our discovery, and radium, might be a great help to humanity, only one of us can give the speech, as is customary. Neither one of us enjoys speaking, but we’ve decided Pierre, as the man, will be better received before the committee. Still, he is nervous about it, and he recites his way through it again as we walk and walk. It is seven pages long but he has memorized it over the course of the very long days of travel coming here. As have I.

  “Pierre,” I tell him now. “Don’t worry any more about the speech. Enjoy the water and the flowers with me now. And oh.” I pull a letter from the pocket of my dress. “This was waiting for us at the hotel, from Irène.”

  At the mention of our daughter’s name, he stops reciting his Nobel speech and smiles. “Writing us the moment after we left, was she?” He chuckles. “Une bonne petite fille.”

  I nod. Irène really is a good child, exceptionally thoughtful and kind, and quite brilliant for an almost eight-year-old. We had left her and Ève in the care of Dr. Curie in Paris, and though I know they will be well taken care of, that we will be back soon, it was still hard to leave them. I unfold her letter and feel a surge of pride at how neat her handwriting is. “She wants to tell us that Ève is already making a mess and stealing her things.” I laugh. At only six months, Ève already feels very formed as a person, with a deep curiosity and spirit and a penchant for invoking jealousy in her older sister. “And she wants us to write back immediately to let her know exactly how long until we leave for Brittany, in minutes.”

  Pierre smiles, shakes his head a little. When we return from Sweden, Hela and Hanna are taking the train from Warsaw to Paris so they can travel together with me and the children to Brittany for a holiday. Hela’s husband, Stan, has to stay in Poland to work. Pierre will stay in Paris to work at first, but he will join us by the end of July.

  It will be Hela’s first time seeing the ocean, and Irène’s first time spending weeks on end with her seven-year-old cousin, Hanna. I cannot blame Irène for her excitement. I feel it too, anxious to be with my sister-twin again. Life has been tough for them in Poland, the revolution there making money tighter, food scarcer, and I am excited for her to have rest and relaxation by the sea. I send Hela money whenever I can, and I’ve already sent money for their train tickets, even bought them clothing for the summer and the beach so Hela will not have to worry about a thing.

  It is strange and wonderful the way this summer is filled with lightness, after last summer was filled with such darkness. Ève is growing, and Irène is becoming a young woman. We are a family of four, with Dr. Curie extending us to five, and our summer will be filled with a little work and more travel and seawater and family time.

  “Mon amour,” Pierre says now, tugging gently on my hand. “Look across the water. Swans.”

  There they are, swimming toward us, an entire splendid family of them, their beautiful wh
ite long necks bobbing into the water. The male and female peck at each other playfully, and then Pierre grabs me and laughs, and he joyfully plants a kiss on my lips.

  A FEW WEEKS LATER, THE NOBEL SPEECH IS FINALLY, FINALLY behind us, and it feels like a weight has been taken away, we have been worrying about it for so very long. The journey to Brittany is easy, and the days there are slow and mostly free of work. We go to the beach, and the older girls play, their laughter a balm.

  Hela is afraid of the water, terrified by the waves. “I cannot go in,” she protests from the edge of the surf as I run into the sea with the older girls, while Hela stays behind with Ève. “I cannot watch,” Hela yells after us, covering her eyes and squealing.

  Hela looks so much older than I picture her in my head, paler and with new wrinkles framing her eyes. Her blond hair is half gray, and I wonder if she sees the same in me, if I have changed in so many ways I have not noticed, but she can.

  I leave Hanna and Irène running into the cold surf, jumping in between waves. I go back for Hela, offer to hold her hand in the waves. But she still refuses.

  She dips only her toe into the water, testing, and then she screams. The girls come running, alarmed. “What is it?” I reach for her, worried she’s hurt or falling ill.

  She reaches down and pulls something from her toes, and there in her hand is a small shell, a hermit crab. I begin to laugh.

  “Stop it,” she says to me. But she puts the shell in her palm; the crab crawls slowly across her hand and then her fingers. The girls are out of the water now, giddy and anxious, and in awe of this smallest creature, coming out of his shell. Then Hela begins to laugh too.

  “Come,” I say to the children. “Pierre will be arriving soon and he knows all about hermit crabs. Let’s put this one in a basin in the house, and he will study the creature with us when he gets here.”

  PIERRE ARRIVES THE NEXT MORNING WITH A BAG FULL OF heavy equipment. And I can tell his rheumatism is acting up again because he walks hunched over, slowly, and limping. “This dampness,” he laments, eyes toward the sea. But is it more than that? It has been years and years now that his bones have been aching, and no doctor can really tell him why. He has finally been elected into the Academy of Sciences, has a good teaching position at the Sorbonne, and we have been given a larger lab in the negotiations. Professionally, he has everything, but he does not have his health, and it feels tremendously unfair that he suffers so.