Half Life by Jillian Cantor (easy to read books for adults list txt) 📕

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 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