Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  I had not seen Kadi in years, not since her concert in Krakow, but we did still exchange letters occasionally. She had relocated to America during the war, and was, by her own account, becoming the darling of the New York orchestra scene. She was seeing an older man, an heir to an American shipping company, but she’d repeated the sentiment she had told me once, when we were so young and living in Loksow, that she would never marry. Her piano career was her entire life, her world. Still, I was happy for her that perhaps she was not quite as lonely as she once had been.

  Leokadia’s reply came a few weeks later, and just like that, a spot opened up for Klara at the top piano conservatory in Paris. I know you will feel good to have her near your sister, Leokadia wrote, and her education will be top-notch in Paris. Better than anything she could ever get in Poland.

  I stared at the word, Paris, in Leokadia’s neat script. All of a sudden, I saw everything I’d lost within Klara’s reach. If I could send her to Paris, I could give my Klara what I once denied myself: opportunity.

  IN AUGUST OF 1919, I BOUGHT TWO TRAIN TICKETS SO THAT I could accompany Klara for her move to Paris. She insisted that, at almost sixteen, she was old enough to take the train there alone, and besides, Hela would meet her at the Gare du Nord. She would live at Hela’s house while she was studying, so she would not be alone. And all that was true, but I could not bear the thought of the worry I’d hold at her going all that distance without me, and so I insisted that I would take her, and that it would give me a nice visit with Hela and Jacques and Marie anyway.

  The night before we were to leave, Kaz reached for me in bed, pulling me close toward him. He kissed the back of my neck, and I felt a familiar warmth travel down my spine, toward my legs. “Kochanie, our baby is a grown woman, isn’t she?” he whispered into my hair, his voice thick with pride, or regret, or was it longing?

  It felt as though her entire childhood had vanished while we weren’t paying attention, and now Klara was no longer our child. It felt impossible that tonight would be the last night she would sleep in our house, in the room right next to mine, and I felt a sudden wetness on my cheeks.

  “What will I do without her?” I choked out into the darkness, in between tears.

  He pulled me closer to him and whispered for me to breathe. I could suddenly remember him holding on to me in just this way in our very tiny apartment in Loksow so many years ago, after my baby Zosia had died and I did not know how I would ever get out of that bed again. He had held me close and held me up. Steady.

  “Who am I, if I am not her mother?” I whispered into the darkness. My life for so many years had been about Klara: putting Klara first, getting Klara fed and educated and keeping her safe. And now what?

  “I think the answer is right over there, on your dresser,” Kaz said. He reached out his arm and pointed to Professor Mazur’s large stack of journals. I’d put them down there months ago after Nadia gave them to me and hadn’t touched them since.

  I shook my head. I had no idea what to do with them. I had only been Professor Mazur’s assistant. I did not have the education she had, nor the clout she had at the university.

  “Remember what you said to me after Hipolit died?” In the dark Kaz’s voice was brimming with quiet excitement. “You have all the research,” he said. “You’re going to finish it . . . publish it. And you are going to be fine. We are both going to be just fine.”

  But Kaz’s words were hard to believe or understand, and I lay there for a long time in the dark feeling deeply unsettled, wondering if it would even be possible for me to live the life of a scientist, after all this time.

  Marie

  Paris, 1920

  The smell of cherry blossoms permeates the air, as I walk to my lab one May morning. And though the war is now behind us and the day is pleasant, I feel quite unsettled on my walk to work.

  I have agreed to an interview today with an American reporter, and I am already dreading it. As a general rule, I do not ever meet with reporters or talk to the press. My entire career the press has chased me and vilified me, and once, it nearly killed me. Usually requests for interviews, numerous which they may be since the end of the war, are thrown away by me or by my assistants in the lab.

  But perhaps it is that Missy Meloney is American, not French. That she has written so many times claiming she wants to help me, it felt a cruelty to continue to ignore her. And she wrote something in her last letter that I feel a sort of connection to: It is impossible to exaggerate the unimportance of people, she wrote. But you have been important to me for twenty years.

  Yes, exactly! I had thought when I read that. It is not I who am important, it is my work. And in those words, it seemed that Missy had understood that too.

  Still, when I walk inside my lab now and see a strange woman sitting there, pale and small and timid, I’m annoyed with myself that I’ve agreed to this particular meeting, in spite of the fact that she actually looks quite harmless.

  “Madame Curie!” Missy stands and calls out for me.

  I sigh and invite her inside my sparsely furnished office. She walks with an unassuming limp, and I pull up two chairs close together, offer her one and sit in the other. I’ve been having trouble with my hearing lately, but I don’t want to tell her that is why I’m sitting so close. She must assume it is because I feel a kinship with her, and she reaches out and pats my hand. “I have but ten minutes before I will have to get back to my work,” I tell her brusquely, pulling my hand back.

  “Of course, you must be very busy,” she says apologetically. “So tell me.” Missy turns to look at me, her coal eyes wide, trained on me, intensely. I wonder if she is judging me, sizing me up: my worn black lab dress and my gray hair and the wrinkles on my face. I put my hand up to smooth back my bun. “This great big beautiful laboratory of yours. Is it filled completely with radium?”

  I laugh. “Oh goodness, no. I wish you were correct. We have but one gram housed here in my lab, and that is all we have in all of France. Not like you have in America. Fifty grams of radium!” My voices rises. “Four in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York . . . shall I go on?” I know the location of every single gram of radium in the world.

  She shakes her head. “Surely you can acquire more?”

  “For a hundred thousand American dollars, yes. Then we would be able to acquire one more gram for testing. Right now, I can’t even use the gram we have in my research. It’s reserved for medical treatments in France.”

  “A hundred thousand dollars,” she muses. “Well, certainly you must have the money, from all your patents and royalties?”

  “I have no patents,” I say. “Radium is for everyone. For the good of science. It’s not mine to profit from. I never patented it.”

  Missy frowns, like she believes I made a grave mistake. And maybe I did. My intention was to share radium with the world, but I never imagined it would become so expensive once others started extracting it, that I would not be able to afford to continue my own research.

  Missy chews on the end of her pen, considering what I’ve just told her. “So you are saying that you, Madame Marie Curie, discoverer of radium, that you do not now have in your possession enough radium to continue your experiments? Nor do you have enough money to acquire more radium?”

  I nod. It is a terrible position I’m in, not to be able to afford to continue my own work. I put the prize money from my second Nobel into war bonds, which have since disappeared. I am living more than fine with my 12,000 francs a year teaching salary, and the sale of a book I’ve recently completed. But the university doesn’t even have enough money for equipment and materials to continue the work I want to do in the lab, much less for more radium.

  Missy chuckles, and now I worry she is mocking me. That she will write an awful and distasteful article about me for all of America to read. “Don’t write this in your article,” I say.

  Her face grows serious again. “Well . . . why not?” she finally asks. “In fact, what if I were to
write exactly that. What if I could help you?”

  “I don’t see how you could possibly help.”

  “What if I were to raise the 100,000 dollars you need to buy more radium, from the American women who read my magazine?”

  Now I chuckle. “That sounds preposterous,” I say. “Raise the money, from your readers?”

  “You underestimate American women, Marie. May I call you Marie?” I nod. The fact that she seems to care about my situation, that she offers a solution, albeit it a ridiculous one, makes me like her just a little bit, in spite of her profession. “I’ll make you a deal,” Missy is saying now. “You let me try and raise the money, and when I do, you’ll come visit me in America to pick up your gram of radium in person.”

  The truth is, I can think of nothing I’d hate more than a long, tiring journey across the ocean, taking me so very far away from my lab and my work. But I agree to her deal. What’s the harm in being polite? There’s no way she will ever be able to raise the money to get me another gram of radium.

  IT IS NOT JUST MY EARS THAT GIVE ME TROUBLE NOW, BUT MY eyes too. Day by day, the world grows darker, softer. Everything becomes cloudy, then murky, and my ears buzz and hum.

  At first I pretend this means nothing, no bother to me at all. I move chairs closer together, talk close to people’s heads. I use a magnifier for everything. But it grows harder and harder to work each day, to teach, and to read. Irène and Ève notice, and they become my eyes and ears. Irène at work. Ève at home. Each night, Ève opens my letters, and reads them aloud to me at dinner, speaking loudly and slowly so I can keep up.

  I dictate my replies, and Ève pens them for me, and then she excuses herself afterward to go practice her piano. I beg of her to take on more studies in science. She tells me that she plans to become, of all things, a concert pianist.

  “Maman,” she insists petulantly. “I am never going to be a scientist like you and Irène.”

  “But you have to,” I implore her. “You can always have piano as a hobby but what good will it do you in world? And further, what good will your piano playing do the world?”

  She gets up and leaves rather than argue with me, and I hear her music in the distance, coming through the dull buzz in my ears. Talking to her is like shouting into a void. It makes me feel sad and empty and restless.

  ONE EVENING A TELEGRAM ARRIVES, AND EVEN WITH THE buzzing in my ears, I can hear the sound of Ève’s sobbing with a startling clarity. I know whatever news it brings, it is not good. We have recently lost Hela’s husband Stanislaw back in Poland, and now what else can it be? Bronia or Mier? I just left Irène at the lab and nothing was amiss there. In the foyer, Ève sits on the floor and howls.

  “What?” I demand, my heart clenching in my chest. I’m remembering that terrible summer so many years ago when my baby died and Jakub died, and my dear sweet Pierre rescued me from my ocean of grief. I am too tired now to be pulled under by such a tide. I cannot survive it again.

  “Cousin Lou has had a hiking accident,” Ève says between sobs. “Aunt Bronia says she is completely paralyzed. They don’t know if she will ever walk again.”

  I close my eyes, put my hands to my ears to try and stop the buzzing. Bronia and I have achieved so much since we were girls. The war is over and Poland is free, and Bronia and Mier are finally talking about moving back home, to Warsaw.

  And then this great tragedy befalls them. It is too much. It is just too much.

  Oh, sweet Lou. I remember hiking with her that long-ago summer, ascending from my terrible fog, breathing in the air of her beautiful Carpathians. Bronia wished for her to go into science and she would not listen, she refused to listen. If only she had listened.

  I open my eyes again. Ève’s tear-streaked face is but a shadow. “This never would’ve happened if she just would’ve undertaken a course of scientific study like Bronia wanted her to,” I say.

  “Maman, are you serious?” Ève snaps at me. “Not everything is about science.”

  She drops the telegram on the table, and runs out of the room. I close my eyes and wait for it. Not even a minute later there is the sound of her piano, far away, dark, like a growing storm.

  Marya

  Krakow, 1919–1920

  I fell ill with a terrible case of grippe on my return to Krakow after moving Klara to Paris, and Kaz was so worried he summoned our niece, Lou, a physician herself now. After I had introduced her to biology in Loksow, she had gone on to study medicine in Paris, then returned to Poland to work alongside her parents in their medical clinic. She moved into Klara’s empty bedroom for a few weeks to watch over my health day and night.

  I was so very ill and so very lonely without Klara. It was hard to breathe, I was delirious with fever, and I truly wondered if the grippe might kill me. I desperately missed the comforts of Klara’s noise, her piano that I’d grown so used to after so many years listening to it.

  Play all the concert halls you dream of, my beautiful girl, I’d told her when I’d left her in Paris, feeling it was my last real chance to be her mother, to give her advice. And if you fall in love, make sure it is with a man who sees you as his equal, and that you love each other and that he does not hold you back.

  Like you and Papa, Klara had said with a smile.

  But was it, really? I had wondered, the whole way back on the train. If I had taken my own advice to Klara, perhaps I would’ve said no to Kaz, gotten on my own train to Paris so many years earlier.

  But Kaz was still here with me now, somewhere, all these years later. My sickness held on and dragged me into darkness. And Kaz’s voice came in and out of my fever dreams, distant and hazy, calling for me as he had once at the train station so long ago: You can’t go . . . Wherever it is you are going, you . . . you can’t. Stay here. Stay with me.

  Then I didn’t step on a train to Paris, or, maybe I did? In my feverish haze, I came out of the Gare du Nord, sunlight so bright I couldn’t see, all of Paris before me and yellow and blinding, melting. And burning up into the blue-hot fire in Professor Mazur’s lab. Everything was too hot to touch.

  ONE MORNING, QUITE SUDDENLY, MY FEVER BROKE, AND I SAT up in bed, sweating and breathless. The December sun shone in through my bedroom window, illuminating Professor Mazur’s stack of journals on my dresser. “Lou!” I called out. “Lou!”

  She came running into my room, her face drawn. Lou was a woman now, and barely anyone still called her by her childhood nickname but me. She was Dr. Helena Dluska, tall and serious, stern and motherly, just like Bronia. It was hard to find even a glimmer of that girl who once traipsed through the Carpathians. My chest rattled with a cough, and I struggled to catch my breath as she walked over to my bed. “Can I get you something, ciotka?” she asked, her voice thick with concern.

  I nodded and pointed to the journals on my dresser. “Yes, bring me those.” Klara was in Paris; my head felt clear for the first time in months. I could not ignore science any longer. I could not ignore the legacy that Professor Mazur had left for me.

  LOU RETURNED TO WARSAW A FEW DAYS AFTER MY FEVER broke, but I was still too weak to get out of bed and do much for weeks. I spent the time with Professor Mazur’s journals, carefully reading all of her notes, combing through her calculations, and then making notes of my own in the margins.

  “She was so close,” I said to Kaz, one night after he’d come home from work, sat down on the farthest edge of the bed, the only spot free of scattered journals and papers. “It’s just . . . I would need to get back into her lab. These calculations aren’t quite right. I’d need more testing, and I have a theory that incorporates Hela’s electromagnetic research with my—”

  “Kochanie,” Kaz cut me off. He loosened his tie and leaned across all the papers to kiss me softly on the forehead. “I think I can help, with the lab.”

  “What?” His words didn’t make sense.

  “I’ve spoken to the dean, and Ola’s old lab space has been empty since the war. They plan to hire a new chemistry professor nex
t year, but until then, he said you can use her lab. On the condition that you also clean it out, get it ready for the next professor.”

  “Kaz!” I moved the notes aside and jumped across the bed to hug him. “Thank you. This is wonderful news!” The idea of a lab, all my own, even if temporarily, bubbled up inside of me, filled me with new possibility and hope.

  IT WAS A STRANGE THING AT FIRST TO BE BACK IN PROFESSOR Mazur’s lab, all alone. There was no one to instruct me, no one to decide what to do. No one at all, but me. Whatever happened here next would be of my doing and mine alone. That was both a glorious and terrifying thought.

  The air in the lab smelled stale and somehow smoky even after being closed up all this time. It was windowless, dark, and hot inside, but still, standing here, I could breathe deeply again for the first time in months. My heart thudded wildly in my chest as I unpacked the equipment that had been stored away for years, cleaned off the canisters and combustion and cooling chambers.

  I had only a few months to finish Professor Mazur’s lifetime of work, but I had already spent weeks in bed charting out what I would do. If I considered Hela’s theory about electromagnetic energy and applied this to the gas rather than trying to liquefy it, as we had been doing before the war, I theorized I could create an electrically charged detonator.

  I wrote both Hela and Pierre for advice, and Hela encouraged me; she was excited by my idea. Pierre wondered if it would be too hard to do it alone. What if I came to Paris, worked on it at the Curie Institute with him and Jacques and Hela and our niece, Marie, a budding scientist? But I was Polish. I belonged here. Any discovery I might make belonged to Poland and to Ola Mazur.