And still, Pierre is my glimmer of hope. I want so very much to believe he has a magical heart, not a scientific one.
Marya
Paris, 1903
The summer in Paris was hot, the heat rising off the streets, visible in cloudy waves that trailed behind the horse-drawn omnibuses. But after only a few weeks, my French improved, and with Pierre’s help, I learned how to take the omnibuses in and out of Sceaux, and I became comfortable getting places in the city on my own.
Pierre conducted his paramagnetism work in a small back space inside Hela and Jacques’s lab. Hela and Jacques had tables and tables lined with rocks, as they were investigating mineral compositions. My sister’s cheeks glowed pink as she showed me the rocks she and Jacques were sampling. As she spoke, my eyes wandered toward the back of the lab, toward Pierre, who had lined up sheets of metals so close together that he barely had any room to work among them. But he was quite thin, and he squeezed in and out of the metals, remarking on measurements to himself.
“Marya, are you listening?” Hela asked, following my eyes toward Pierre. She looked at me and frowned, then leaned in and lowered her voice. “Jacques feels sorry for him,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“He doesn’t have the right schooling,” she whispered. “He never did well in traditional schools the way Jacques did, and even with many scientific studies, he’s had very little in the way of findings. The university won’t hire him to teach. If we don’t make the space for him in our lab, who will?”
“But he’s very kind,” I said to her, narrowing my eyes. Perhaps it was all the food he’d continually offered me in Sceaux or the peaceful moments our morning bicycle rides had brought to me, or the way he had delighted in the idea of my women’s university in Poland. But I felt defensive of him now.
“Yes, so very kind.” Hela smiled at me and shrugged. “But he is lucky to have Jacques, that is all. His head is in the clouds. Who knows where he would be if left on his own.”
BRONIA’S CHILDREN WERE FEELING MUCH BETTER BY THE END of June, and so it was time for me to leave Sceaux and go stay with her for the remainder of my time in France. I felt a little sad to leave the expanse of the Curies’ house and my morning bicycle rides with Pierre. So much so that when Pierre offered to give me Jacques’s bicycle to take to La Villete with me, to have to ride for the rest of my stay, I accepted his offer.
“What in heaven’s name is that?” Bronia demanded, when I stepped off the omnibus, holding Jacques’s rickety old bicycle. I didn’t answer her—of course she knew what it was—and I kept walking toward her house with it. The bicycle was light and freedom, and it gave me the time and space each morning to clear my head, to think. Though it would not be the same as riding through the flowers in Sceaux with Pierre, I hoped to ride it through the cobblestone streets of La Villette while I was here.
Lou and Jakub, however, were delighted to see me with it, and they both begged me to teach them to ride it. “Absolutely not,” Bronia said. “You’re both still recovering from your coughs.”
Truth be told, they looked healthy to me, and aside from an occasional cough I saw no trace of illness in them. “I’ll teach you when she’s at work,” I whispered to Jakub, and his little green eyes lit up, and he squeezed my hand.
“Marya,” Bronia said my name sharply, and I turned away from my nephew. Lou’s eyes were wide, worried her mother had heard my whispered exchange with her brother and that now we would both be in trouble. But instead she said, “You’ve gotten fatter living in Sceaux. What were the Curies feeding you?”
She rested her hand across my belly, which perhaps had expanded a little. “Let me examine you,” Bronia said, moving her hands to feel my stomach.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her, pulling away. “I am perfectly healthy.” I’d been offered, and eaten, more food than I’d ever seen in my life in Sceaux. And somehow all the worry that had followed me around in Poland for so long had lifted, and I was hungry again. My body was blossoming here, free, in Paris.
A NEW LETTER FROM KAZ HAD COME TO BRONIA’S HOUSE THIS past week, as it had every week since I’d arrived. I had yet to open a single one, but had them in a pile at the bottom of my valise. Bronia brought it to me as I unpacked my things in her small guest room. I’d left the bicycle outside, of course, and I didn’t have much in my valise, only a few well-worn dresses and undergarments, and I got them put away in the chest in only a few minutes. I shut the last drawer, and Bronia stood there, holding Kaz’s new letter out to me. I put it inside my valise with the others, without opening it, and then she frowned.
“What is really going on?” she demanded, a hand on her hip.
“Nothing is going on,” I lied. The truth bubbled up in my throat, but I couldn’t tell my sister-mother what had really happened, that Kaz had betrayed me. That Leokadia had betrayed me. That Sceaux and a rickety old bicycle and Pierre Curie had made me feel alive again these past few weeks and that now I didn’t want to read any of Kaz’s letters and face my real life at all, extinguish the glimmer of happiness I’d been feeling in Paris. “I’ll open it later, when I’m alone. That’s all, Bron.”
“I really wish you’d let me examine you. If you’d just lie down, I could do it right here.” Her hand went back to my stomach, and I abruptly pulled away from her.
“I promise you, I am fine,” I snapped at her.
Her frown creased deeper, but she sighed and let it go, and she went down to the kitchen to prepare supper.
A FEW DAYS BEFORE HELA’S WEDDING IN JULY, THERE WAS A large bicycle race running all through France, ending in Paris. Pierre asked if I would go to Ville d’Avray to watch the finish with him, and I offered to take the children along with us so Bronia could help Hela with last-minute arrangements.
The day was quite warm, the air humid, and my dress felt much too tight, constricting even my slightest movements. Bronia was right—I’d been eating too well since I’d come to France, and I had put on weight. I hoped the dress Hela had insisted on paying the seamstress to make for me to wear to her wedding this coming weekend would still fit.
At eleven years old Lou already comported herself like a woman, a miniature Bronia, and as we stepped off the omnibus and into the very crowded street of onlookers, she commanded Jakub to hold her hand and stay close by. Jakub, darling seven-year-old gentleman that he was, complied, attached himself to his older sister. I held on to his other hand and with Pierre just a step ahead of us, we made our way through the crowd to wait for the racers.
“Did you know,” Pierre crouched down to tell the children, once we could not walk any farther through the crowd, “eighty men entered this race nineteen days ago, and now at the end only twenty-four are still in it. Twenty-five-hundred kilometers these men have bicycled. In nineteen days!”
Lou’s eyes widened. “That’s over one hundred and thirty kilometers on a bicycle every single day,” she said. I smiled, pleased by her quick math skills. “May I take Jakub closer to the front so we can see the bicycles better, ciotka?” she asked me.
“Yes,” I told her. “Just continue to keep a close watch on him. We’ll wait back here.”
Lou and Jakub squeezed through the adults and got up closer to the street. My eyes followed them, and I laughed a little watching them squirm through child-size spaces up to the front of the crowd.
“I always thought I would have children of my own,” Pierre said, wistfully, and in that way he had of saying whatever it was that came to his mind whether it was entirely appropriate or not. It was one of the reasons why I liked spending time with him. His unadulterated honesty.