Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  And besides, I like working alone, I wrote back to Pierre. I like making my own choices, being entirely responsible for my own results.

  I ROSE FROM BED EACH MORNING AT DAWN, AND THOUGH MY body was exhausted, my mind was utterly alive and buzzing with thoughts and ideas. I spent every waking hour inside my new lab. Sometimes, I did not even come home at night until after Kaz was in bed, already asleep.

  One night in April when I made it home in time for dinner, Kaz greeted me at the door with a gentle kiss. Then he picked up my hands, stroked my fingers and frowned. “Kochanie, your fingertips are black.”

  I shrugged and wiped sweat from my brow with my free hand. My face was still warm, burning from the heat I’d created in my combustion chamber, and my entire body ached from standing all day. But my mind felt so wonderfully alive that I barely noticed the physical toll the lab was taking on me or the blackness of my fingers.

  “You have been working so hard, kochanie,” Kaz was saying now. “Maybe we should take a vacation?”

  “I can’t leave,” I told him. “Not now. I don’t have much time left with the lab. I need to seize every moment I can there.”

  He nodded. “Well . . . then, maybe I could buy you another bicycle?” he said kindly. “Oh! I could buy two and we could ride them together.”

  I smiled at him, grateful for his concern. “That sounds nice,” I lied. In truth, bicycle riding sounded utterly exhausting. And he’d said it on such a whim, I figured he would forget all about it.

  But he did not forget. A few weeks later when I got home from the lab, two shiny red bicycles were waiting outside on our front porch. Kaz sat in his rocking chair, smoking his pipe, reading by lamplight in the dusk. He had been waiting for me; he watched for my reaction.

  “Oh, Kaz.” I laughed and ran my fingers across the handlebars, noticing the black streaks I left behind on the metal.

  “Come, kochanie, take a ride with me.” He stood, putting his book and pipe down.

  “Now? It’s late. It’s almost dark out.” Besides that, I was exhausted from standing in the lab all day.

  He walked to me and gave me a hug. “So, it is late?” he said into my hair, his breath tickling my neck. “Why not? We are still young.”

  I laughed at the absurdity of him believing us to be young, but then I felt a sudden surge of energy, and I wanted to ride. I wanted to feel young and free and light again. I got on the bicycle, and I began to pedal down our street.

  “Kochanie, wait. Slow down! You are too fast,” he called after me, laughing, sounding like the young man he once was in Szczuki. Both of us like the young people we once were.

  I pedaled and pedaled, Kaz and the wind behind me, meandering through the streets of Krakow, through the gates of the university, not stopping until I was back at my lab. Kaz pedaled in behind me, breathing hard but smiling. “Did you forget something?” Kaz asked, motioning toward my lab.

  I shook my head. It was true what I told Pierre, that I liked working alone, liked being in charge of my own results. But I had accomplished something earlier that I wanted to share with someone else now. “I want to show you what I have been working on,” I told Kaz, putting my bicycle down on the grass.

  “Now? But it is too dark to see.”

  I held out my hand for him. He hesitated for only a moment before he took it, and we walked into the science building. We climbed the stairs, walked inside my tiny lab. It was very dark, and he reached for the lamp. “Don’t,” I said, gently pulling back his hand.

  “But I can’t see what you’re doing in the dark,” he insisted.

  “No, Kaz, look.”

  I gently turned his shoulders so he was facing the combustion chamber, where, a little while ago, I’d left mercury in an electrically charged tube. I’d finally gotten the electric charge right, lighting the mercury into fire. In the absolute blackness of this night, the mercury fire glowed, making my dark, small lab alive with an ethereal silvery-blue firelight. Here it was, right in front of our eyes: the key to Ola Mazur’s detonation device. Blue and alive. Otherworldly. The last sliver of dusk.

  “Oh, kochanie,” he said, staring at my mercury flames. “Look what you have done!” He stepped closer to the combustion chamber, and his face illuminated blue and gold. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” And it was.

  Marie

  America & Paris, 1921–1922

  Our voyage across the Atlantic feels painstakingly long, and I spend most of my time aboard the RMS Olympic in my suite, feeling dizzy. Ève and Irène leave me, to enjoy the extravagant meals and the views with Missy, who traveled to Paris to accompany us to New York. Then they come back periodically to check on me. They cluck likes hens, worried I haven’t been eating enough, getting enough exercise, haven’t been having fun.

  “This is not vacation,” I tell them, more sharply than I mean to. “This is work.”

  After all, a deal is a deal. In less than a year’s time, Missy has raised her 100,000 dollars, the women of America coming through with their donations just as she believed they would. I suppose I underestimated her, the way people have been underestimating me my entire life. And the fact that she pulled this off makes me actually admire Missy. I am thrilled that I will soon have another gram of radium for France. But I hate the fact that I have to undertake such a journey: this transatlantic voyage, to be followed by a seven-week speaking tour of America, stopping at women’s colleges, accepting honorary degrees. We will end in Washington, DC, at the White House, with the presentation of my new gram of radium by President Harding. I tell Irène and Ève this is work, but what it truly feels like is a distraction from my real work in the lab. I’d give anything to be back there instead.

  The truth is, I can barely see now, and I’d confided as much to Missy in a letter last month as a way to perhaps get me out of this journey, after all. But then instead she wrote me back to tell me she set up an appointment for me with a specialist in New York. And now that feels more than half the reason for taking this voyage in the first place. I want my radium. Yes, I do. But more, I need my eyes back. I need to be able to see again in the lab, or the radium itself will be useless to me. And all the doctors I’ve seen in Paris have told me nothing useful but that perhaps I should retire. They say it is the radium and the X-ray exposure during the war that is causing me such problems in the first place. But I am still much too young to retire from the lab. My lab is my life; my work is my entire world. What do I have left if I am forced to leave it?

  “Marie,” Missy says to me, trying to cheer me up on the journey. “So many women in America, they adore you. You inspire them. They are so excited to meet you. How wonderful this will be for you to get so much attention!”

  What is it she wrote me once, about the unimportance of people? Why do they care about me? They should care about the science, the radium.

  “They do!” Missy promises me. “How do you think I managed to raise all this money in just a few months’ time?”

  But Missy doesn’t understand the way this trip looms ahead of me in darkness, the way I dread all the talking and the social interaction and the press. Oh dear God, the press. Missy has promised me there will be no mentions of my scandal with the Langevins, saying no one in America cares about that sort of thing. But once I am halfway across the Atlantic, the ocean surrounds me, the rocking of the boat across the water makes me dizzy and ill, and I wonder how I have gotten myself into this. What I wouldn’t give now for my eyesight and a simple anonymous existence, toiling away my days in the lab.

  WHEN AT LAST WE DOCK IN NEW YORK CITY, I DRESS IN MY old comfortable black dress, but I adorn myself with a new and modern taffeta hat that Ève picked out for me before we left Paris. I feel ridiculous in it, but before I can change my mind and take it off, the press is already waiting, swarming, shouting for me: Madame Curie. Madame Curie!

  I hear them over the buzz in my ears, see a horde of them gathering through the fog and film of my eyes. And suddenly I am gett
ing off that train from Brussels again, my stomach filled with that never-ending pain and loss.

  It is hard for me to breathe, and I let Missy and Irène and Ève do most of the talking. I sit in a chair in between them, trying not to cry. Answering only a few questions about radium.

  The next morning the New York Times prints the most egregious front-page headline: MME. CURIE PLANS TO END ALL CANCERS.

  “This is not at all what we told them.” I wave the paper around at the dining table in Missy’s elegant Greenwich Village apartment, nearly knocking over my china coffee cup.

  Ève steadies my cup, takes the paper, reads the article, and looks up. “They call me the ‘girl with the radium eyes.’” She laughs, delighted.

  “That’s preposterous,” I snap at her. “If you had radium in your eyes, it would blind you.” Though even as I am saying it, I understand how apt it is. How beautiful, how phosphorescent my youngest daughter is. I should tell her that, but I don’t. That’s not the point.

  I try to remember now my exact words about radium and cancer at the dock, but it wasn’t this. I’d only said that I planned to use my new gram of radium to experiment with new cures for cancers, never promising I can cure them all. “I’m here one day and already the press is lying about me. I need to go back to France. Irène, buy us tickets for the next boat!”

  Irène sits perfectly still, frozen, like she is trying to decide what to do, how to temper her own joy of experiencing New York City and my anger. She opens her mouth to speak, then closes it again saying nothing at all.

  “Marie.” Missy stands, walks to me, puts her hand calmly on my shoulder. “I’ll call them and we’ll get them to print a retraction, all right? It is not done with malice, simply excitement. America adores you, that’s all. And people are excited about a cure for cancer! You did this. You’re saving so many people’s lives.”

  I soften at her compliment, and agree, that yes, a retraction might do.

  The following day, they do indeed print one: RADIUM NOT A CURE FOR EVERY CANCER. But Missy and I have to flip through to page sixteen to find it.

  THERE ARE SO MANY SPEECHES AND COMMITMENTS OVER THE next weeks, and I tire so easily, feel so dizzy, that Irène and Ève stand in for me more and more as we travel across the country, from east to west, New York City, and upstate, and then on to Pittsburgh. We stop in Chicago and the festivities are larger than in New York. Missy says it’s because many Poles live here, and they all come out, cheering for me. But what they are cheering for exactly, I don’t know.

  I feel like an exhibit, a commodity, and I am itching to flee, back to Paris, my lab, back to the science. I am doing what I must to get my radium—smiling, waving, speaking when I can. But it is harrowing and painful. I despise every minute of it. It is not what I want, never what I wanted.

  Lou is in a facility in Chicago, trying to regain sensation in her legs, and we schedule a visit with her into all the busyness. It is a shock to see her in her wheelchair, crippled and despondent, staring out her window at the steely Chicago sky.

  “Your color is so good,” Ève lies, kissing her cousin on the head. Irène nods eagerly in agreement.

  Lou turns to look at me, and I go in close to her face so I can see her, really see her. Her eyes are round and large and vacant. I hold on to her shoulders in an awkward hug. “It is too hard to live this way, ciotka,” she says softly to me.

  Her voice sounds flat, and it is hard to remember that girl who took me up in the Carpathians, once. But she is in here somewhere, I know she is. “You are a strong woman,” I tell her. “Like me. Like your mother. We have all endured so much. You will get through this.”

  She pulls away from me, frowns, and turns her gaze back out the window.

  She worries me, and I hate to leave her like this. But she cannot walk; I cannot bring her with us westward. And Missy has us scheduled for two weeks more.

  THE FOLLOWING YEAR, BACK IN FRANCE, EVERYTHING IS looking brighter.

  I have my new gram of radium, new work underway. I’ve had surgery for my cataracts in both eyes, after the doctor Missy set me up with in America diagnosed that as my problem. And I can see again now, with the help of my magnifying lens.

  When the urgent telegram arrives from Bronia, I pull it from Ève’s hands this time, wanting to read it myself.

  Lou is dead.

  I read the words, and they sink inside my body, a weight.

  “What is it, Maman?” Ève asks, alarmed. “Is it Lou?”

  I am surprised by Ève’s perceptiveness, but perhaps I shouldn’t be. She had been cheerful in Chicago, but she had been there. She had seen Lou’s vacant stare and terrible crippled legs. “She took her own life,” I say, reading through the rest of the telegram, breathless.

  Ève puts her hand to her mouth, and her eyes well up with tears, and she runs out of the room. I don’t realize my own hands are shaking until Irène pulls the telegram from them, places it down on the table, and sits down on the floor with me, putting her arms around my shoulders.

  This can’t be right. This can’t be true. My chest aches for my sister-mother, both her children gone too soon. Why must death hover around my family? I try to breathe and my lungs burn, as if I’ve run and run for days. So many people gone; so much loss surrounds us.

  What if I had done things differently in my life—could I have stopped this all from happening? Perhaps I could’ve talked to Lou that summer in the Carpathians, tried to convince her to give up hiking for science. Or I could have gotten a doctor to heal Jakub if I’d convinced Bronia to stay in Paris just one summer longer. And Pierre. What if I had stopped him from going out that one afternoon into the rain? In all these years, I have changed the entire course of science; why have I not been able to save my family?

  “It is all my fault,” I say. “Everything is my fault.”

  Irène clings to me. “Maman, how could this be your fault? What could you have possibly done?”

  “I could’ve stopped them; I could’ve done things differently.”

  “Maman,” Irène whispers and strokes back my hair, like I am the child and she is the mother. “Lou was in terrible shape when we saw her in Chicago. There was nothing to be done.”

  I hold on tightly to Irène, breathing in the scent of her: flowers and sunshine and the lab. “You will never leave me,” I say. “My darling girl, promise me that.”

  “I promise,” Irène says.

  Marya

  L’Arcouëst, 1922

  I spent the summer of 1922 at Hela and Jacques’s house in L’Arcouëst, and even Bronia agreed to come for a few weeks so all of us sisters and our children could be together again. Our husbands mostly stayed behind to work, except for a few weekends here and there. But the three of us and all our children were together for the first time in so many years. It was glorious.

  I’d spent the past year writing up Professor Mazur’s research and my results into a paper. I no longer had use of the lab at Jagiellonian, as the dean had hired a new chemistry professor for Professor Mazur’s job, an older man who had no interest in continuing with me on my mercury research, in spite of all the arguments Kaz tried to make to him on my behalf. Still, I had months of results, a paper to prove it now. I brought my paper with me to L’Arcouëst for Hela to look through, and I hoped that she would agree that applying her electromagnetic theory to mercury was highly exciting. That she might even want to endorse my findings about using mercury to ignite an electrical switch, and that she might help me get it published in a scientific journal.

  “Marya,” she said, after she was finished reading my words. Her cheeks were pink, her voice effusive. “This is brilliant. Your research could be revolutionary. If ever there were another Great War, imagine how this device could help with precision in bombs, and . . . aircraft.”

  I smiled, but Hela was getting ahead of herself. I’d gotten mercury to ignite in an electrically charged tube, and theorized the rest, that this could work as a detonation device, or in a swi
tch. That seemed far off still from controlling bombs, and another war? God forbid. I said all that to Hela, and she laughed.

  “Well, every large idea is a small idea, first.” She paused for a moment, as if to think, and I remembered a Latin phrase I’d learned once at my Flying University in Loksow: omnium rerum principia parva sunt. The beginnings of all things are small. “Why don’t you come to Brussels with me in October, Marya, and we can present this paper at the Solvay Conference, together? Perhaps someone there would want to undertake more of this research with us.”

  “Solvay?” I remembered how Professor Mazur had attended, how she had met Hela there once, just before Hela had won her Nobel Prize. I was almost entirely self-taught. I could not imagine I would fit in with scientists like Hela who had advanced degrees from top schools. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I will pay for your ticket,” Hela said. “You have no reason not to go.”

  “Oh, you two.” Bronia rolled her eyes. “Can we stop talking about science for five minutes and go enjoy this beautiful view, hmmm?”

  “You should talk, Bron,” Hela retorted. “You are always working.”

  “I have taken this entire month off,” Bronia retorted back, sounding uncertain, like she could barely believe her own words. “Lou and I both have.”

  “I’ll stop talking about science, if Marya will agree to come to Brussels with me,” Hela said. Both her eyes and Bronia’s fell squarely on my face, staring at me, waiting for me.

  “Yes,” I finally said, feeling both excited and terrified. “I’ll go to Brussels with you.”

  THEN I SAT OUT ON THE BEACH IN BETWEEN MY SISTER-MOTHER and my sister-twin, and all of us, with our wrinkled faces and graying buns now, we forgot about science for a little while. We watched our grown children swimming, racing each other in the water, laughing and teasing one another, cousins and comrades. Lou was the fastest one, with Jakub coming in second. (Of course Bronia’s children were the best and fastest, just like their mother.) Marie beat Klara—my beautiful, musically inclined child always came in last, the least athletic of all her cousins.