Half Life

by Jillian Cantor

  Out on the beach, Hela reached for my hand, and I reached for Bronia’s hand, and we all sat there like that together, three old women, forever connected to one another by blood and by love. And yes, by science, too.

  “Look at all we have become, all we have done,” Hela said, a smile in her voice as we stared out at our children and onto the great expanse of water. I’d grown used to its size, so I no longer feared it. I still didn’t like to go in, but I enjoyed taking in its enormous beauty. Bronia squeezed my hand in response, and I squeezed back.

  My sister-twin had won science’s biggest prize, and she and Jacques had patented their discovery, making them flush now with royalties and allowing them to construct a three-story lab of their own in Paris where they were continuing with their work. Marie was finishing up her degree in chemistry to work alongside them.

  My sister-mother and her Kazimierz had run a successful sanatorium in Zakopane for years and were making plans to move back to Warsaw and open their own hospital there, where Lou planned to work too. Jakub was studying medicine at Jagiellonian, and one day no doubt, there would be an entire hospital staffed with a full line of Dluski doctors.

  And me? I had raised my beautiful and talented daughter, given her life and music and opportunity. And I had taken Professor Mazur’s research and turned it into something of my own, a theory, a paper. A small thing that maybe would become a big thing. After I went to Solvay with Hela, if I managed to get my paper published, perhaps one day when I was no longer here on this beach to watch my Klara swim, or listen to her give a concert, a little piece of me, a little piece of my idea, would still be left behind in this great big world.

  PIERRE HAD STAYED IN PARIS ALL SUMMER, WORKING WITH Jacques, finally, on his pitchblende. Hela said the real reason he stayed behind was for Jeanne, who refused to be in a room with Hela any longer (much less spend the summer in the same house) since Hela had hired Paul to work with her and Jacques last year. He’s a highly qualified scientist, Hela had said to me with a shrug.

  I felt annoyed with her on Jeanne’s behalf. Oh, Hela, I said, was there no one else? But anyway, I didn’t believe what Hela said to be true. Pierre had wanted to test his theory on the pitchblende for so many years. That meant more to him than any woman, any love. That’s why he stayed in Paris.

  But then Pierre showed up in L’Arcouëst late one afternoon in August, just a few days before we were all set to go home. His beard was a shocking snowy white, and his hairline had receded enough so it almost disappeared, leaving him nearly completely bald. But when I caught his eyes, they were still as deep and blue as the water surrounding Stockholm.

  “Is everything all right with the lab?” Hela asked, alarmed to see him. She and Jacques were working on using their electromagnetic research for medical imaging, and her new lab was now her most important child.

  “Yes, quite,” Pierre said. “I just needed a few days out of the city. Jacques is still working, not to worry.”

  “Hmmm.” Bronia folded her hands in front of her chest and stared at Pierre with the same look of disdain she’d given him once so many years earlier when we’d returned to her house in La Villete after watching the bicycle race. I smiled a little at the memory.

  “If you must know,” Pierre said, looking at the three of us a little like all together we were a force that frightened him. “Jeanne and Paul have decided to reconcile.”

  “Oh, Pierre,” Hela said, offering him a quick hug. “I’m so sorry.” Pierre shrugged, but he kept his eyes on me. I offered him a small smile, a shrug of my own in return, surprised that maybe Hela had been right about why he’d stayed in Paris this summer all along. Love, not science.

  “There’s vodka in the icebox,” Bronia said, walking toward the kitchen. “Pierre, you look like you could use it.”

  LATER, AFTER EVERYONE HAD GONE TO BED, PIERRE AND I SAT out on the back deck, still nursing our vodkas. A lamp sat on the table between us, and in the flicker of the flame, I could sometimes see the waves in the distance as I heard them crashing against the rocks.

  “I don’t know that I ever really truly loved her,” Pierre said softly.

  “You must’ve. To have stayed with her for years,” I said.

  “Hmmm,” Pierre said. “But maybe there is a difference between a great love and companionship, mon amie.”

  I thought about Kaz, all our many years together, and I didn’t know if I agreed with Pierre. What was a great love if it did not fill in the spaces of loneliness over so much time? If all a person needed to survive was her studies, her work, her lab, then I would’ve stepped on that train to Paris so many years ago and left Kaz at the station. But that was not all there was. What was the point of work at all, if you had no one to share it with? “How is your pitchblende?” I asked him, changing the subject.

  He smiled wanly. “Jacques and I may have finally isolated what I’ve been looking for all along. An entirely different element than becquerelium, with different chemical properties.”

  “Pierre! That’s wonderful!”

  He nodded, took a large sip of his vodka. “Yes, I suppose I should feel happy. But . . . what does it matter now? Who else will care but me? And, I’m old and barely a real scientist.”

  “For one thing, you are very much a real scientist. And for another, you’re not that old,” I said to him.

  He sighed and swished the vodka around in his glass. “Anyway, my legs are quite tired,” he said. “It is hard to get out of bed in the mornings, much less undertake the strenuous work of scientific study. I think I’ll retire to Sceaux and spend my remaining days in the gardens of my childhood.”

  “Nonsense. You’re in good health. You must continue your work,” I insisted. I thought about how much Hela’s support of my paper meant to me, and I wanted to give the same to Pierre. “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Hela wants me to come present my research in Brussels at Solvay this fall. I’ll go present my research if you also come present yours.”

  He laughed, like he thought I was joking, and then his face turned when he noticed my serious expression.

  “Well, why not?” I said. “What if generations of future scientists can use these things we discovered? What if our small discoveries make the entirety of our lives and all our choices matter?”

  Pierre finished off his drink and stared into the flicker of the flame. “What if, indeed,” he finally said.

  Marie

  Paris, 1925–1926

  Irène completes her doctoral thesis on the alpha decay of polonium in the spring of 1925, and I’m thrilled that this daughter of mine and Pierre’s is continuing on with our work. Polonium has still been largely ignored since we discovered it, and that has continually been my greatest regret as a scientist.

  But my darling Irène takes a special interest in polonium, and I love her even more than I ever have. She finishes her thesis and achieves her degree from the Sorbonne.

  We work side by side together in my lab, day in and day out. We have everything. Satisfying work, good salaries, a beautiful home in Paris and also the one we are building now in L’Arcouëst for summers. We take our meals together each day and walk to the lab together. She is my eyes and my ears and sometimes my mind. Why would we ever need anything else aside from each other?

  But then I assign her to train a new, young chemical engineer in the lab, Frédéric Joliot, on how to use precise laboratory techniques in radiochemistry. And suddenly, she is staying late to help him, arriving early to help him. Abandoning me to help him.

  I must walk to the lab alone some mornings, because she has already eaten, left ahead of me to get there early. And the walk down rue Pierre Curie to our lab suddenly feels very long and very lonely indeed.

  IN JUNE, MISSY WRITES ME A LETTER ABOUT AN AMERICAN girl who’d been working for the US Radium Corporation in their plant in New Jersey. She was a dial painter, painting watches with radium, and now she is suing the company, claiming that her work, which required her to use her lips to pr
epare her radium brush, has caused damage to her health.

  Ève reads me the letter over supper, as my eyes are giving me quite a bit of trouble again and Irène is not yet home from the lab. I’d left her there hours earlier, working with Frédéric.

  “Missy wonders about the effects of radium on your health, Maman,” Ève says, as she continues reading down the letter, discussing nine factory women who have supposedly died. “I worry, too, about you and Irène working with radium all the time like you do. And didn’t those other two men just die in France?”

  Marcel Demalander and Maurice Demenitroux were young men who had worked in my lab once, and more recently were preparing thorium X for medical uses in a factory outside of Paris. They had recently died a few days apart of different illnesses, causing the press to try and blame radium.

  “Don’t be silly,” I say, pushing her concerns away with a flick of my hand. “My lab is very safe. I’ve always taken every precaution. We vacation away from the city every summer, get plenty of fresh air and outdoor activities to clear our lungs.”

  “But these girls, and . . . your health.” She puts the letter down and frowns.

  Ève does not understand what we do. In spite of all my protests, she has decided to pursue piano professionally, and she will give her first concert in Paris soon. I do not understand her attraction to the piano as a career, or how she believes it will sustain her mind and her body for the entirety of her life. But no matter what I say to her, how much I’ve tried to engage her with science, she has gone back to her piano again and again.

  “There is nothing wrong with my health,” I say now. “I am a perfectly fit fifty-seven-year-old woman.”

  “Who can barely see or hear,” Ève says. “And you’re exhausted all the time.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” I say, my voice shaking.

  “Don’t be angry.” Her voice softens. “I just worry about you, that is all, Maman.”

  “I don’t need you to worry about me. Perhaps if you undertook a scientific course of study like your sister you would understand,” I say.

  Her face falls, like I have slapped her, though I have not moved at all. And she stands up, walks out of the room.

  A few moments later I hear the sounds of her piano drifting across the house. She is playing something soft and high and sad, and it reminds of the sound of the raindrops on the metal roof of my laboratory the afternoon Pierre was killed.

  I bite back tears, and I think, I should go to her. I should tell her that. I love Ève, but I never know how to understand her, how to talk to her. I am always saying the wrong thing to her.

  But Ève is also right, I am exhausted. I sit there listening to her play, and I close my eyes, thinking of those raindrops, that last day I saw Pierre alive. And I fall asleep right there in my chair, dreaming of that other life, that other time.

  ÈVE WANTS ME TO ATTEND HER FIRST PIANO PERFORMANCE A few weeks later, and I plan to go. But I am much too tired when the night arrives, and I stay home and go to bed early. Irène goes in my place, accompanied, Ève reports the following morning at breakfast, by Frédéric Joliot.

  “You are getting too attached to him,” I tell Irène. “I want you to work with another student in the lab, starting today.”

  Irène blushes, makes a face at Ève, then sips on her coffee. “Fred is sweet, Maman. And funny.”

  Fred? “Hmmm,” I say. “What use does a Curie woman have for sweet and funny?”

  “I could think of a few,” Ève jokes.

  “He is a brilliant scientist, too,” Irène shoots back, both of us ignoring Ève.

  “You are the brilliant scientist,” I say to Irène. “And Fred is nothing but a distraction.”

  “Maman.” Irène shakes her head, closes her eyes, and frowns deeply. For a second I remember that once Pani Zorawska had believed of me what I am now saying of Fred. But this is different. This is completely different. Irène is too good to be distracted by any man.

  “I’m serious,” I say. “I want you to stay away from him.”

  Irène sighs, stands up, clears away her breakfast dishes. “I need to get to the lab,” she says abruptly, kissing me on top of my head before she walks out.

  I’m still watching her go, considering if I should go after her, when Ève says, “If you were wondering, Maman, my concert last night went very well. I’m going to play another one in Brussels in the summer. I hope you’ll be able to come?”

  I am tired of arguing with her. Tired of begging her to choose me, to choose science, and my mind is with Irène, imagining her walking into the lab without me, talking to Fred.

  “Maman?” Ève asks.

  “I will try, darling,” I say, distractedly. “I really will try.”

  “I HAVE SOMETHING TO TELL YOU,” IRÈNE SAYS, A FEW WEEKS later at supper.

  “Hmmm?” I am not very hungry tonight, and I have been looking over a paper, leaving my food barely touched. Irène has been quiet these last few weeks, tiptoeing around me, ever since I told her to stay away from Fred. I’m relieved she wants to tell me something now, and I put the paper down and look up.

  “Fred and I are going to be married,” she says abruptly.

  Her words reverberate and shock me, and I blink, thinking I misheard her. “What?”

  She repeats it again, married, and I hear her, watch her lips move and her mouth turn up into a smile. But it is as if she’s speaking another language or playing one of Ève’s songs on the piano. Something I cannot possibly understand.

  “No,” I say. “I will not allow it.”

  Her smile turns to a frown, a look I have barely seen on her face, one that is more similar to Ève’s favorite expression. “Maman,” she says gently. “I am twenty-nine years old. Fred and I are in love.” She pauses. “We have everything you and Papa once had, a shared love of each other and our work. How can you not understand that?”

  My eyes sting with tears, thinking of Pierre. A shared love of each other and our work. But that is what I have with Irène now. She is my partner; she is my confidante. What will I do without her?

  And what would Pierre say, if he could be sitting here in this moment? We want her to be happy, mon amour. We want for her a good and easy life.

  But she is happy already, with me.

  Mon amour, she is a twenty-nine-year-old woman. She is in love.

  But what does she know?

  “Maman,” she tries gently again, bringing me back to her. “I’m not asking for your permission. I’m telling you what is going to happen. Fred and I love each other. We are getting married.”

  What can I do? What can I say? I have lost so much, so many people. As worried as I am for her, giving herself over to a man, I cannot stop her. She is a grown woman, a brilliant scientist. But I cannot lose her either. And most importantly, she cannot lose her herself.

  “I will insist upon a prenuptial agreement,” I finally say. “Stating that the lab and all the radium belongs to you and only you.”

  “Fine,” she says. “Fred doesn’t care about any of that. He loves me, and I love him.”

  “Perhaps you love him now.” I want her to understand, I only want what’s best for her. I do not want her to be hurt by love the way I have been. “But love is fleeting,” I tell her. “Science will never leave you.”

  Marya

  Warsaw, 1926–1932

  After Klara graduated from the conservatory, she got a job with a symphony in London. And once she was supporting herself, I told Kaz what I desired more than anything was to move back to Warsaw, my childhood home. Agata had relocated to Warsaw after the war and had expanded our university there, renaming it Women’s University of Poland. I wanted to teach with her once more.

  Kaz said that he, too, was ready for a change, and most of all, he wanted me to be happy. He retired from his position at Jagiellonian, and we moved into an apartment in Praga Połnoc, Warsaw, with a very nice view of the Vistula River from our bedroom. I returned to t
eaching with Agata just a few days after we moved in.

  Our children were grown, and our lives were completely different than they once were—Agata’s husband had passed away three years ago, and her son Piotr was studying art in Krakow, but our friendship returned immediately, with all the ease we’d once had working together in the Kaminski house in Loksow.

  “Oh, Marya,” Agata said. “How good it is to be with you again.” And I agreed completely, feeling the same about her. “The school was never the same without you.”

  I smiled, relieved and happy, thanking her for welcoming me back after all this time and after all the work she had done to build it without me, from the small university it once was in Loksow.

  But Agata said that she was the lucky one. “The students have so much to learn from you now, after what you have accomplished, Marya.” She beamed at me with pride.

  After I went to Solvay with Hela a few years ago, she helped me patent my device, which I called the Mazur-Zorawksa detonator. But I did not desire money, or fame, and I’d handed the patent over to the Polish government in hopes they could explore ways to use it to help my beautiful country stay beautiful and free and Polish for many generations to come.

  I had my experience in the lab and the Mazur-Zorawska detonator to teach a new generation of Polish women about. I taught chemistry and physics classes at Women’s University, as I once had, so many years ago. But now I had a very nice classroom, inside a very nice building, and no fear to walk inside of it.

  I reveled in the comforts of teaching, of sitting inside a room with windows and walking to a café for lunch, breathing the fresh Warsaw air again. I loved the sounds of the free Polish language as I walked on the streets each evening toward home, the same paths I’d walked as a girl. Perhaps most of all I enjoyed watching my young students’ faces and eyes light up when I told them stories about Hela and Jacques accepting their Nobel, and me completing Ola Mazur’s research using Hela’s theory, and even Pierre discovering his new element after so many years of wanting.