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 prepare 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.”