Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  She looked up again. “What if we could work out an arrangement? I need an assistant in my lab, but I do not have a stipend to pay for one. You could work in my lab for free, and I could ask the university to enroll you in classes as payment.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but then didn’t know what to say. No one had insisted upon my education like this, not since Bronia and Papa pushed me to go to Paris the summer I married Kaz instead. But that was so long ago now, it felt like a cloud in my head, hazy and blurry and ephemeral. A feeling more than a memory.

  A new but familiar wanting bubbled up inside of me. The laboratory I’d always dreamed of being a part of now sat right here in Krakow, close enough to touch.

  “Think it over. Discuss it with your husband,” she said. She stood and patted me gently on the shoulder. “It would be a shame to let your mind go to waste.”

  And then as quick as she’d come into my house, she was gone.

  PROFESSOR MAZUR’S LAB WAS WORKING TO STUDY COMBUSTION and detonation theory, which I found so endlessly fascinating that I spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming about the extent of the experiments I might be asked to work on as her research assistant. My thoughts still filled with blue-hot flames and fires as I walked to pick Klara up from school and then listened to her practice piano while I prepared dinner in the kitchen.

  If I were to discuss this with Kaz, as Professor Mazur suggested, I felt sure he would take a practical tact. How would I have time to take care of Klara and him and the house and work in a lab? he might ask. But I could not stop thinking about what Professor Mazur had said: it would be a shame to waste my mind.

  I sent an urgent telegram to Pierre, asking for his advice. He had spent most of his adult life in a lab, amid both his own recent failures and Hela’s and Jacques’s successes. I felt sure he would know what I should do.

  Pierre responded right away.

  Combustion! Marya, you must. Hela and Jacques are here and they agree. Hela says she met Ola Mazur at Solvay last year, and she is brilliant.

  (Speaking of brilliant, your sister and my brother are having quite the success with their magnets. Do you find it hard to be the sibling to such brilliance? Or is it just me?)

  All the Curies send their love, Pierre.

  Marie

  Paris, 1910–1911

  At the end of 1910, I put my name into the running for an open spot in the French Academy of Sciences. I do it almost on a whim—a spot has been vacated by a death. But it is not the first time, and it will not be the last time. The Academy is made up of older, dying men.

  One of my research assistants says, Madame Curie, you should try for it. They need someone like you. Whether he means because I am younger, or the only Nobel Prize winner here, or a woman, he does not say.

  He is quite young, still a student, tainted by the naïveté of youth, and perhaps in that moment I am blinded by his naïveté as well. Why not? Just like that, I put my name into the running.

  And maybe also I am blinded by happiness. A new clarity about my future.

  Paul and I have begun meeting at our pied-à-terre again this fall, but only once a week now. A stolen hour out of 168 during my entire week. It is not enough time with him, but it is also what I look forward to most. All week, I write down ideas to share with him, scientific questions to ask him, and when at last we finally see each other I am almost bubbling over with so much to say to him.

  Paul is building a case that he can use against Jeanne, documenting the histories of abuse with his lawyer. And Jean Perrin has warned her if she threatens me again, or tries anything unsavory, she will be arrested, her children will be taken away from her. Paul will get everything. Whatever else I know about Jeanne, I also know she loves her children. She stays away from me, and I from her.

  It unsettles me still, to think of her, though, to remember that we were friends once. She was very kind to me after Pierre died, bringing food to the house for the children. I cannot reconcile this with the woman who hates me now, with the woman who is keeping me from being with Paul. I try not to think of her at all. And then, when I remember again and again that she is married to the man I love, I feel something cold in my chest that makes it hard to breathe for a moment.

  But when I am with Paul I think only of him, only about how I love him and he loves me. Once a week, we lie in our bed together in our pied-à-terre, and Paul kisses a trail of whispers down my bare arm. “Je t’aime, ma lumière rayonnante,” he says. That is what Paul always calls me: his radiant light.

  I imagine what it would be like to have him all the time, and not just in our apartment, but in the lab with me, day in and day out.

  “Bientôt,” he promises me, when I tell him this. Soon.

  I hold on to that word, a promise, and after our hour is up, I go back to the lab, my mind fresh and open with a new sort of clarity, a new and burning desire to work harder.

  IT IS FOOLISH TO BELIEVE THAT I WILL BE ELECTED INTO THE Academy because my work is deserving of it. In the beginning of January, just before the vote, the papers begin to print the most terrible things about me. Lies about how I have accomplished nothing since Pierre’s death, and how I only won the Nobel because of him to begin with.

  “What about in the year after his death, when I established the atomic weight of radium on my own?” I say to Paul, wasting our one hour a week with complaints about the terrible press I am getting ahead of this vote.

  He kisses my face, and I know he wants me to stop talking, to undress instead, but it is so hard to love someone for only an hour a week. It is hard to love someone and not be able to share your thoughts and your hopes and your dreams and your worries. I keep them inside of me all week long, and now that he is here, so close, it all comes pouring out of me. I can’t help myself.

  “They are all old men,” Paul says. “They’re worried about a woman who is smarter than them, upsetting their old ways of thinking. Ignore what’s being said in the press. They’re just trying to force you to drop out. Stay strong, and keep on with your brilliant work.”

  “Do you think it will really come down to my work?” I am skeptical now. I wish I’d never put my name in to begin with. It is hard to see so many negative and untrue things being printed about me in the papers now and hard to only have Paul to reassure me for just this one single hour.

  “Marie,” Paul says my name softly, kisses my other cheek. “We don’t have much time. Come to bed.”

  IN JANUARY OF 1911, THEY TAKE THE VOTE, AND I DON’T WIN the spot in the Academy. A man, with half the qualifications and more than twenty years my senior, is elected instead. It is not necessarily surprising, though I feel more disappointed than I would expect. My whole life I’ve been told no simply because I’m a woman. It was foolish to believe this time would be different.

  Still, the next day I am back at it again in my lab. I will work even harder. Prove them all wrong, as I always have.

  I am still trying to establish the decay of polonium and also planning for my new, bigger laboratory that the university has agreed to build. I am still working to achieve the international standard for radium, and we are so very close that I can almost taste the success of it.

  I will show those men; I will show everyone.

  EASTER WEEKEND, PAUL MANAGES TO GET AWAY ON SATURDAY afternoon, and I take the train to meet him at our apartment. I get there, and I find the door ajar. It is unlike Paul to forget to shut it, and I push it open a bit, alarmed. “Paul,” I call out. “Paul?”

  But the inside of the apartment is quiet, the drawer where we keep all our letters to each other in the living room wide open and shockingly empty. “Hello?” I call out into the apartment, my heart pounding wildly, but no one answers back. I walk through and the rooms are empty.

  Paul opens the door a few moments later, walks in, takes one look at me and says, “What’s wrong, ma lumière rayonnante?”

  “The letters,” I say. “Someone must’ve broken in and . . . stole all our letters.�
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  Paul’s face instantly becomes bloodless, and he hangs his head down between his knees as if he might vomit, or faint. I go to him, rub his back gently, until he stands up again. I put my hand to his face, trail my finger softly across the swirl of his mustache, his lips.

  He leans down and kisses me gently. “I have to go,” he says softly.

  “But, Paul, you just got here.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “Marie, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “SHE WANTS MONEY,” PAUL SAYS TO ME THE FOLLOWING WEEK. He has come to my lab during lunch hour, and my research assistants stare at him now, curious. They haven’t seen him in months, since Jeanne threatened me, and we agreed, through Jean Perrin, not to see each other. I take his hand and lead him outside to the street. The midday sun is hot, blinding, and I shield my eyes.

  “How much?” I ask.

  “Five thousand francs,” he says, lowering his voice, looking at his feet.

  I remember once how I had offered to help Jeanne if she needed money, but not like this. “And if I pay her . . . then she will let you end the marriage?” I ask.

  He looks up at me, his eyes wide, and he shakes his head. “Then she will not release our letters to the press,” he says softly.

  The press. They’ve finally stopped printing lies about me now that the Academy vote has passed and I’ve lost the spot. I remember the poetry of Paul’s words about my body in his letters. I shiver, even in the heat of the sun.

  “They already tried to crucify you, a woman, daring to go up for a spot in the Academy,” Paul is saying now. “Imagine what they would do with these?”

  I do not want to imagine. I lean against the wall of my lab, put my head in my hands. “Okay,” I say. Five thousand francs is a lot of money, but it will not destroy me. “I’ll give her five thousand francs.”

  “And we cannot meet anymore,” he says softly. “I cannot risk what she will do to you now that she has those letters. She could ruin you. And I love you, ma lumière rayonnante. I would never forgive myself.”

  “No.” I refuse to accept that. “Not being with you will ruin me. We will keep our distance for now. But I know we will be together, soon. I know it.”

  “Marie,” he says my name so softly and so sadly, like he is singing a funeral song. “Marie, Marie, Marie.”

  I WAS WRONG. LOVE AND SCIENCE, THEY ARE NOT ONE AND the same. Love has come and gone in my life, permeating me with nothing but sadness in the end. Kazimierz. Pierre. And now Paul.

  But science, it is always here. It never leaves me or abandons me or hurts me or stops needing me. My lab calls for me and waits for me. It is my life and my home, and the truest thing I have ever devoted myself to.

  Jean Perrin reports that, in spite of my five thousand francs, Jeanne Langevin is still telling everyone on boulevard Kellerman she would like to kill me. “Perhaps you should leave for the summer?” he says gently. “Let her calm down.”

  “I already paid her to calm down,” I say. “With the money I was going to use to rent a house in Brittany again this summer.”

  But I don’t think Jean Perrin is wrong, and Bronia has been after me to bring the girls to Zakopane for the summer. She has room for us. We would only have to pay for the train, and Ève has never even been to Poland. I imagine both of my girls there, happy and carefree, picking berries and riding horses in the pastures and smelling the Polish country air of my youth. And I write Bronia to let her know that we are coming.

  THE SUMMER AIR IN ZAKOPANE SMELLS SWEET AND FRAGRANT, the city feeling a lifetime away. When we arrive, Bronia and Lou are in the kitchen together eating fresh-picked blackberries. My niece is now nineteen, a full-grown woman, an apparition of the Bronia I knew in Warsaw once long ago. She is more muscular, her cheeks more ruddy, but with Bronia’s haunting eyes all the same.

  Irène and Ève go to their room to unpack, and I sit down in the kitchen with Bronia and Lou, still unable to rid myself of the fog that hovered in the city—Jeanne’s threats, and the ache of missing Paul. On the train I thought of so many things I wanted to share with him about my latest findings on polonium’s decay, how excited he would be about my revelation, that the half-life must be much shorter than that of radium. And now I feel a residual emptiness, not being able to tell him.

  “Here.” Bronia holds her hand out across the table. “Have a blackberry. They are so sweet. I promise, they will fix what ails you.”

  I frown and shake my head, pushing the fruit away. I’m not hungry.

  “You need to forget about him,” Bronia says quietly. I’ve written to Bronia about Paul, but I have not told her about the death threats, or the five thousand francs I gave away. “He is married,” she adds, her tone unforgiving, unyielding.

  “Jeanne does not love him like I do,” I say petulantly. I realize I sound like a child, but I don’t care. “Their marriage is all but over.”

  Bronia frowns and chews on a blackberry. “But she is still his wife.” Bronia emphasizes the word wife, like I do not understand its meaning. “No matter what happens between me and Mier, I would want to destroy any woman who believed she could have him. Who thought she could take him away from me.”

  Lou pops a blackberry in her mouth and chuckles, perhaps at how serious Bronia sounds, or perhaps at the ridiculousness of Bronia’s statement. Bronia, the caretaker, the physician, could never destroy anyone.

  “You would blackmail someone?” I say to her. “You would threaten to kill someone?”

  “Her husband is being unfaithful to her,” Bronia says, frowning. “Who is the villain in this story, hmm?” she adds softly.

  My cheeks turn hot at the implication that I am the villain. Or is she saying that Paul is the villain? I open my mouth to lash out at her. What does she know? Her husband is still alive and working with her. They have their simple and beautiful life here in the mountains. But then I don’t say anything at all because maybe she is also right. In another life, one where Pierre had not stepped in front of a horse on a rainy April afternoon, Jeanne might be the one I feel sympathy for now, not Paul. It is a hard thing to admit, even to myself, and I swallow, saying nothing else at all.

  “I’m never getting married,” Lou announces, standing. Bronia’s frown creases deeper. But Lou ignores it, kisses Bronia on the head. “I’m going for a hike,” she says, bored with our conversation. I remember what Bronia told me once about Lou and Mier and their fascination with hiking after Jakub died. Now, at nineteen, Lou is nearly a professional, she knows the Carpathians so well. Bronia, however, wishes she’d earn a degree in science instead.

  “Take me with you,” I implore her, in part because I want to go. I want to forget all about Jeanne and Paul and the fog that had hovered in Paris. But I also know my interest in Lou’s hobby will annoy Bronia and will get her mind off my love life.

  “You want to know the mountains, ciotka?” Lou asks, seeming surprised. “Mama says you are only comfortable inside a laboratory.”

  “Does she now?” I say, looking back at Bronia. She’s still frowning. “Your mother might not remember that I used to ride my bicycle all throughout the French countryside. I am a big believer in the power of fresh air to help the brain and heal the body.” And saying it out loud, I remind myself that it is also true.

  I lace up my boots and follow Lou to the path. We climb and climb. For a long while there is only the conversation with my sweet niece about the beautiful nature that surrounds us, the fresh Polish summer air in my lungs, the big blue sky above us, my breath heavy in my chest, and the feeling of my heart bursting from exertion.

  Marya

  Krakow & Zakopane, 1911

  Leokadia came to Krakow to give a concert just before Easter, invited to perform as the special guest of the Krakow Philharmonic Orchestra. Her popularity had risen in Germany and Austria in the past few years, and as a native Pole, she was now highly sought after in Krakow, a city with both Polish and Austrian identities.

  Kaz was away in Brussels at a con
ference, but I bought tickets for me and Klara to attend, and we made plans to have dinner with Leokadia afterward. Klara was so excited she could barely stand it, and she spent the day trying to teach herself to play the music from the Beethoven concerto Leokadia was set to play that night. It was, of course, still much too hard for her, but she wrinkled up her small forehead in concentration and taught herself the beginning portion, at a much slower speed.

  “Do you think she remembers me?” Klara asked as we walked to the concert together that afternoon, arm in arm. The late day was warm, balmy. The pink amaryllis had just begun to bloom and they smelled divine. I inhaled, enjoying the contrast to what I smelled so often now in Professor Mazur’s small lab as we worked side-by-side with combustibles: smoke and ash, everything burning. It was so hard to get the smell of burning out of one’s nose, even after I went home for the night to Kaz and to Klara. I breathed deeply now, wanting the scent of amaryllis to stay with me forever. “Do you, Mama?” Klara prodded. “It was a very long time ago that I met her.”

  Perhaps in Klara’s small life, it was a very long time ago. A time, for her, before piano. Before Krakow. I imagined it must be hard for her to even remember that other life of ours, our little apartment in Loksow on Złota Street with our view of the smokestacks. And all the hours and hours she spent with me at my school. “Of course she remembers you, mój mały kurczak.” I reached my hand up to smooth a stray hair back into her braid. “And I tell her about you in my letters whenever I write to her. She is very excited about your progress at Chernikoff.”

  Klara smiled and I relaxed into my half-lie. I had written to Leokadia about Klara attending Chernikoff, but only once. We did not write each other enough letters anymore for either one of us to keep up on anyone’s progress.

  I learned about Leokadia’s progress as I read the concert program while we waited for the concert to begin. According to her biographical note, she had sold more records than any Polish woman pianist in history. And she was currently touring, performing with symphonies all across Europe and Asia.