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.