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

Bronia and Papa pushed me to go to Paris the summer I married Kaz instead. But that was so long ago now, it felt like a cloud in my head, hazy and blurry and ephemeral. A feeling more than a memory.

A new but familiar wanting bubbled up inside of me. The laboratory I’d always dreamed of being a part of now sat right here in Krakow, close enough to touch.

“Think it over. Discuss it with your husband,” she said. She stood and patted me gently on the shoulder. “It would be a shame to let your mind go to waste.”

And then as quick as she’d come into my house, she was gone.

PROFESSOR MAZUR’S LAB WAS WORKING TO STUDY COMBUSTION and detonation theory, which I found so endlessly fascinating that I spent the rest of the afternoon daydreaming about the extent of the experiments I might be asked to work on as her research assistant. My thoughts still filled with blue-hot flames and fires as I walked to pick Klara up from school and then listened to her practice piano while I prepared dinner in the kitchen.

If I were to discuss this with Kaz, as Professor Mazur suggested, I felt sure he would take a practical tact. How would I have time to take care of Klara and him and the house and work in a lab? he might ask. But I could not stop thinking about what Professor Mazur had said: it would be a shame to waste my mind.

I sent an urgent telegram to Pierre, asking for his advice. He had spent most of his adult life in a lab, amid both his own recent failures and Hela’s and Jacques’s successes. I felt sure he would know what I should do.

Pierre responded right away.

Combustion! Marya, you must. Hela and Jacques are here and they agree. Hela says she met Ola Mazur at Solvay last year, and she is brilliant.

(Speaking of brilliant, your sister and my brother are having quite the success with their magnets. Do you find it hard to be the sibling to such brilliance? Or is it just me?)

All the Curies send their love, Pierre.

Marie

Paris, 1910–1911

At the end of 1910, I put my name into the running for an open spot in the French Academy of Sciences. I do it almost on a whim—a spot has been vacated by a death. But it is not the first time, and it will not be the last time. The Academy is made up of older, dying men.

One of my research assistants says, Madame Curie, you should try for it. They need someone like you. Whether he means because I am younger, or the only Nobel Prize winner here, or a woman, he does not say.

He is quite young, still a student, tainted by the naïveté of youth, and perhaps in that moment I am blinded by his naïveté as well. Why not? Just like that, I put my name into the running.

And maybe also I am blinded by happiness. A new clarity about my future.

Paul and I have begun meeting at our pied-à-terre again this fall, but only once a week now. A stolen hour out of 168 during my entire week. It is not enough time with him, but it is also what I look forward to most. All week, I write down ideas to share with him, scientific questions to ask him, and when at last we finally see each other I am almost bubbling over with so much to say to him.

Paul is building a case that he can use against Jeanne, documenting the histories of abuse with his lawyer. And Jean Perrin has warned her if she threatens me again, or tries anything unsavory, she will be arrested, her children will be taken away from her. Paul will get everything. Whatever else I know about Jeanne, I also know she loves her children. She stays away from me, and I from her.

It unsettles me still, to think of her, though, to remember that we were friends once. She was very kind to me after Pierre died, bringing food to the house for the children. I cannot reconcile this with the woman who hates me now, with the woman who is keeping me from being with Paul. I try not to think of her at all. And then, when I remember again and again that she is married to the man I love, I feel something cold in my chest that makes it hard to breathe for a moment.

But when I am with Paul I think only of him, only about how I love him and he loves me. Once a week, we lie in our bed together in our pied-à-terre, and Paul kisses a trail of whispers down my bare arm. “Je t’aime, ma lumière rayonnante,” he says. That is what Paul always calls me: his radiant light.

I imagine what it would be like to have him all the time, and not just in our apartment, but in the lab with me, day in and day out.

“Bientôt,” he promises me, when I tell him this. Soon.

I hold on to that word, a promise, and after our hour is up, I go back to the lab, my mind fresh and open with a new sort of clarity, a new and burning desire to work harder.

IT IS FOOLISH TO BELIEVE THAT I WILL BE ELECTED INTO THE Academy because my work is deserving of it. In the beginning of January, just before the vote, the papers begin to print the most terrible things about me. Lies about how I have accomplished nothing since Pierre’s death, and how I only won the Nobel because of him to begin with.

“What about in the year after his death, when I established the atomic weight of radium on my own?” I say to Paul, wasting our one hour a week with complaints about the terrible press I am getting ahead of this vote.

He kisses my face, and I know