If You Are There

by Susan Sherman

  He tried to put the incident out of mind. It was a child’s night terror. Still, he couldn’t quite dismiss the giggling and there was something else, an impression of a child singing. He couldn’t swear he had heard it. Perhaps it was in his head. It sounded like the song Noémi sang that night at the séance, the familiar tune he remembered from his childhood. Of course, it was impossible. His imagination was obviously untethered by Baye’s brandy. Still, as he made his way to the corner it nagged at him—the thought that he wasn’t alone in that showroom. It settled on him like the curious weather suspended over the Street of Dolls.

  He hadn’t gotten far when he realized that he still had the keys in his pocket and had neglected to drop them through the slot in the door. He was on his way back when he saw Baye leaving through a side door. Baye didn’t see him and for some reason Gabriel didn’t call out. Instead, from the shadows he watched the man walk around to the front of the building and on down the street.

  It took only a moment to realize what had stopped him from calling out. It was the way Baye was walking. He was no longer dragging his right leg. The leg and the arm, in fact the whole body, moved differently. He tramped along the sidewalk, swinging his arms, his legs unfettered, vigorous, inattentive to the dangers of the slippery pavement. He stepped off the high curb and crossed the street, striding over the cobblestones with an unconscious grace, moving like a young man with an appointment to keep.

  CHAPTER 6

  November 1902

  Lucia spent a good part of the first week cleaning, polishing, and scrubbing in an effort to reassure Madame Curie that she had not been wrong in hiring her. Each day when the Curies returned home, she expected some comment on her work but never received more than a hasty greeting. When her mistress came into the kitchen on that first night, she took only a quick look at the chicken stewing in the pot and left without a word.

  At first Lucia thought that Madame Curie was displeased and so she worked even harder to please her. She cleaned out the cupboards and organized the dry goods, labeling the jars and stacking them on the shelves in alphabetical order. When Madame Curie came into the kitchen that second night it was only to ask if Iréne ate more than pippins and tapioca for supper. “The child cannot live on apples and pudding, Lucia.”

  “Yes, madame.”

  On Wednesday Lucia went down the street to the market and bought an inferior cut of meat. Since her new employers didn’t have much money, meals would have to be stretched; catfish had to make do for halibut, carp for sturgeon, and the ropey beef had to be tenderized into submission. That evening she made a marinade of cloves, onions, and a whole head of garlic. She added an herb bouquet of thyme, bay leaves, parsley sprigs, peppercorns, and allspice berries. She marinated the roast all night and in the morning she turned it over and basted it every hour until it was time to cook. She braised it for three hours in a broth made from cracked veal knuckles, split calf’s feet, and six cups of beef broth. When it was time for supper she cut the slices thin to give the appearance of filling the platter and served it with braised carrots and new potatoes.

  She knew it was time to clear the plates when the Curies shoved them aside and began to work. They were huddled over the gray notebook, their heads together, round-shouldered, Madame Curie making complicated calculations on a separate piece of paper.

  Lucia waited for some comment, but they were lost in the work. “How did you like the beef?” she asked finally, her tone edged with impatience.

  Madame Curie grunted, her pencil flying over the page. Monsieur Curie looked up perplexed: “Did we have beef?”

  Monsieur Curie was not like any man Lucia had ever met. He hardly ever spoke to her, and when he did, he almost never looked at her, preferring instead to look just past her or down at his hands, muttering under his breath in a voice so low that she had to ask him to repeat himself, which she did not like to do. In addition, he had a high-pitched giggle, the laugh of an excited adolescent. Once or twice she happened to glance at one of the gray notebooks that lay open on the table. It was divided into columns like a ledger, like Mademoiselle Wolfowitz’s grade book. In the far left column the time was noted. Next to it was a description of a candle blowing out. Further down on the page her eye caught a description of a face floating over a cabinet. All the notations were executed in his schoolboy’s scrawl.

  “Yes, my son, we had braised beef for supper,” the old man said with a patient smile. He had just returned from putting Iréne to bed. “The best I ever ate, I might add.” He winked at Lucia.

  She reddened with pleasure and made herself busy with the dishes.

  The next day Lucia spent the morning baking bread and in the afternoon she tackled the flue. It hadn’t been cleaned in years. Sometime after Iréne’s nap the doctor shuffled into the kitchen in his stocking feet and announced: “Come along, mademoiselle. The sun is out and we’re going to the park.”

  Lucia poked her head out of the flue. She was standing on a ladder she had borrowed from the greengrocer’s downstairs. Her hands and face were covered in soot. “You want me to come with you?” He nodded and told her he could use the company. What a strange family, inviting the servant out for a stroll.

  Dr. Curie was nothing like his son. He was lively, a charmer, who laughed easily and had something to say about most everything. He was never still. Even when he was sitting some part of him was on the move, a tapping foot, a bouncing knee; his legs seemed to have a life of their own. He was a short man, a head or two shorter than his son, with a long face made longer still by a patch of white beard on his chin. He favored loose blouses tucked into his trousers and when it was sunny he wore wide-brimmed straw hats, which were usually torn and dirty.

  They placed Iréne in her pushchair and together they walked down to the park where they took turns maneuvering the stroller down a gravel path. It was chilly under the trees, the bare branches crosshatching the sky. The doctor seemed to be enjoying himself as he kept up a steady monologue about the trees and the flowers they were passing. At one point he stooped to pick up a seedpod, a green spiky thing that to Lucia looked dangerous. He held it out for her, but she did not want to touch it. “Go ahead. It won’t hurt you,” he said, urging her with an outstretched hand. “It’s a horse chestnut.”

  She took it gingerly and held it in her palm, bending and patting the spikes. They were pliable and interesting.

  “I have no idea why they call it that,” he said, stooping to pick up another. “They’re not chestnuts and if you feed them to a horse, it’ll convulse and die.” He scraped the pod with his thumbnail until he broke through the flesh and tore open the outer casing to reveal a large smooth nut inside. He held it out for her and this time she took it without hesitation.

  After that, there was more talk about trees, a linden and a cedar, and several species of birds. When they came to a pond the doctor stopped and studied the surface of the water and the sandy shore that surrounded it. Then he brightened. “Look.” He was pointing to an unremarkable toad sunning on a flat stone. It was hiding in a leafy grotto at the marshy end of the lake. A moment later he was in the lake, going after the creature, stepping on stones to keep his shoes dry. He was surprisingly agile for an old man, able to leap from rock to log in pursuit of his prey. When he had caught the slippery thing, he held it out for her to see. “A common midwife toad.” He was pleased with his prize.

  He asked her if she wanted to hold it. She curled her lip and shook her head. He laughed at this and opened his hand. Instantly the toad hopped back into the water and disappeared beneath the murky surface. Then it surfaced again some distance away and struggled to climb up on a rock. “There, she looks happy.”

  “How do you know it is a she?”

  “She’s bigger than her mate. In the spring she will give her eggs over to him and he will carry them on his back until they are ready to hatch.”

  They sat by the lake looking for more toads and frogs and saw a turtle or two. The doctor told her that he h
ad worked in the museum laboratories in the Jardin des Plantes and that made sense since he seemed to know so much about plants and animals. She liked that he didn’t treat her as most people did when they found out she was the hired girl.

  “Clever girl,” he said, when she correctly identified a male midwife toad. It wasn’t difficult. He looked just like his mate, only smaller. Still, his praise made her smile and she remembered it later while cutting up vegetables for the soup. That night before climbing into bed she looked up toad in her dictionary and got a picture of a fire-bellied toad common in Poland.

  Over the next month or two Lucia accompanied the doctor and Iréne to museums, galleries, and gardens. He was devoted to his granddaughter and took her everywhere. Whenever Lucia could find time to join them she was treated to lectures on the natural world, art, music, and the wonders of science. In this way she acquired an education of sorts that may have lacked depth but enjoyed a breadth that was at once splendid and chaotic.

  In January the house was full of excitement, because the Curies had received their shipment of dust. Lucia tried to understand what the fuss was about. All she could gather from their conversation was that a mountain of burlap sacks filled with dirt had arrived, several tons of dust mixed with pine needles and something called pitchblende.

  The next day the doctor explained that it was a black ore mined on the German-Czech border, the source of uranium. He described uranium as a gray metallic element used to color ceramic glazes.

  They were on their way to the park. It was a boisterous day noisy with the clatter of the wind through the bare branches. “The children have discovered a new element and now they are trying to isolate enough of it to get an atomic weight.” He described atomic weight as the mass of one atom of an element. “The atom is the smallest particle in the universe. It makes up the elements. If they can get the atomic weight of this new material, then they’ll have proved that they found something new.”

  “And an element?”

  “It’s the building block.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of everything.”

  Lucia woke in the middle of the night and lay in her cot listening. She slept in the parlor, as there was no other place for her, unfolding her bed at night and folding it back up in the morning. Something had awakened her and she was trying to figure out what it was. It was a cold night, heavy from the recent rain, the eaves were still dripping from the storm, but that’s not what woke her. It was another sound, something unfamiliar. She lay there in the dark motionless until she heard it again. Someone was shuffling around in the kitchen. She could plainly hear the pad of bare feet on the linoleum, a doleful sigh, and the creak of the floorboards. After a while the sounds faded away and soon all she could hear was the wind playing with the roof tiles. She concentrated on the muffled sounds of the night, listening for anything out of the ordinary, but all was quiet and she began to relax. Her eyes closed and she started to drift off, until she heard it again.

  A shuffling in the kitchen. Muffled foot falls. A whispery sigh. Someone or something had just come back in. It was drifting about the kitchen seemingly without purpose or reason. Her breath caught in her throat. She knew without a doubt that this was no intruder. This was an apparition. Babusia had always taught her to watch out for the spirits. They were everywhere, and just like with the living, some were bad and some were good. Sometimes it was hard to tell them apart, so her best advice was to stay away.

  Something was standing just on the other side of the open doorway. All she could do was lay there and listen to the tiny creaks and groans, the padded footfalls, the feathery commotion that seemed to be filling the kitchen.

  Eventually she willed herself to sit up.

  She listened harder but heard nothing. She climbed out of the cot and stood. Her legs had gone rickety. She thought that at any moment she might collapse. She wanted to call out and wake the doctor, but he was on the other side of the kitchen in the pantry and she would have to wake the whole house for him to hear her. She crept into the room, which was black and cold, the fire in the stove having been reduced to its last ashy coal. Peering into the gloom Lucia could see a figure standing at the sink, a shadow dressed in a long nightdress or shroud. Lucia stood there unable to move, unable to even cross herself. She wanted to open her mouth and scream when the figure turned and began walking towards her in a jerky, silent way.

  A hand touched her shoulder. She jumped and cried out.

  “Hush now. I’ll get her.”

  Monsieur, dressed in a nightshirt, moved past her. He took the spirit’s hand and kissed it, and when he turned her around Lucia could see that it wasn’t a ghost, but Madame Curie. Her eyes were open and staring, and yet she didn’t seem to know that he was there.

  “What is it? Is she sick?” Lucia asked.

  “She is asleep.”

  “But she is walking around. Her eyes are open.”

  “She is walking in her sleep. It’s the New Zealander, the Italian, and the German. They have her worried, so she walks at night.”

  “Worried?”

  “She doesn’t want them to be the first. She wants it for herself. I keep telling her it doesn’t matter. If it gets done, that’s what’s important. Who cares who finds it, as long as it is found.”

  Lucia had no idea what he was talking about, but by now she was used to that. She stood in the doorway and watched their slow progress back into the bedroom. He was gentle with his wife, helping her along one step at a time. Once in the bedroom he reached past her and quietly closed the door so as to not wake her. It was touching, the way he took care of her, even a bit sad. It reminded Lucia of the male midwife toad and how he took the eggs from his mate and cared for them on his back, until they were ready to hatch.

  The next morning the Curies were up early and after a few bites of breakfast began to gather up their things. No mention was made of the night before. Madame looked tired and seemed anxious to get back to the laboratory. Iréne put up the usual fuss, refusing to eat her breakfast and tearful because her parents were about to leave. She held up her arms, fingers splayed and cried, “Mé. Mé.” She called her mother Mé and her father Pé. Since she couldn’t pronounce Lucia, she called her Lulu and now everyone in the household called her that.

  Madame Curie put down her satchel, lifted her daughter up out of her high chair and held her, kissing her face and the top of her head. “Give her a proper breakfast, Lulu,” she said, kissing the child’s foot and making her laugh. “No more pippins and tapioca.”

  “Yes, madame. I’ll try.”

  “Just do it, please.”

  “Of course, madame,” Lucia said, uneasily. She was thinking how difficult it was to get the child to eat. There would be tears and a tantrum and it would all be for nothing, for most likely Iréne would, in the end, have her way.

  Iréne cried when her parents left and would not be comforted, even when the doctor scooped her up and walked her around the room, bouncing her and singing the nonsense song that he made up on the spot. Finally, when she had quieted down, Lucia put her back in the high chair and gave her an egg and a piece of cheese, which she tore up into tiny pieces but refused to eat. She shook her head and clamped her lips closed when Lucia tried to get her to take a bite. She wanted her tapioca that sat in its customary bowl on the counter and kept pointing to it with a naked urgency that would not be appeased.

  Eventually, Lucia gave up and while she spooned the pudding into the child’s mouth she asked the doctor about the New Zealander, the Italian, and the German and what they did to upset Madame Curie.

  “It’s a race,” he said, shaking out his morning paper and folding it back. He glanced over at his granddaughter and laughed because she was holding out an apple slice for him with solemn resolve.

  “What kind of a race?”

  “To find the radio elements.”

  “The what?”

  “Chemical elements that emit rays. Rays of energy. Radiation, that’s what
Marie calls it. Uranium was only the first. Marie found other metals that give off energy. How is it that even if you lock this material in a drawer or bury it underground or drop it into boiling acid, it still emits these rays? Remarkable when you consider that it is impossible.”

  “Impossible?”

  “Like rain falling up or birds flying upside down. It cannot happen. And yet it does and no one knows why.” After that there was talk about the first law of thermodynamics, how energy could not be created or destroyed within a closed system, only transformed. Yet these materials spontaneously create energy. Lucia pictured these rays as the same ones that came out of the head of Mary, the Blessed Mother, depicted in the painting of the Holy Mother and Child that hung in the Church of Mary Magdalene near Babusia’s house. She imagined them as blue bands flecked with gold, miraculous, the rays of God’s light, the Holiest of Holy. When he told her these rays were invisible she thought them all the more wondrous.

  “Are they miraculous?” she asked.

  “What else would you call them? Energy out of nothing? They would have to be.”

  That afternoon the doctor told Lucia to dress Iréne warmly, as they were going to the laboratory to surprise the children. They stepped out into a blustery day under a sky pregnant with snow. Lucia carried Iréne on her hip and walked alongside the doctor up rue de la Glacière past a shop where pairs of shoes hung from a cord, one on top of the other, like strange fruit.

  The School of Physics at ESPCI, École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles, where Monsieur worked and where the laboratory was located, was only five blocks away in the rue Lhomond. Lucia was disappointed when she saw the building. She had been expecting a resolute seat of learning with a fancy façade and wide stone steps leading up to heavy brass doors. Instead she found an ancient building, grimy with age, covered with a scaffolding of rough lumber placed there by workers who were hired to replace a bank of broken windows. The workmen didn’t seem to be in a hurry to get started. They stood around hunched over their cigarettes, not doing much of anything.