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

“Madame Curie!” Missy stands and calls out for me.

I sigh and invite her inside my sparsely furnished office. She walks with an unassuming limp, and I pull up two chairs close together, offer her one and sit in the other. I’ve been having trouble with my hearing lately, but I don’t want to tell her that is why I’m sitting so close. She must assume it is because I feel a kinship with her, and she reaches out and pats my hand. “I have but ten minutes before I will have to get back to my work,” I tell her brusquely, pulling my hand back.

“Of course, you must be very busy,” she says apologetically. “So tell me.” Missy turns to look at me, her coal eyes wide, trained on me, intensely. I wonder if she is judging me, sizing me up: my worn black lab dress and my gray hair and the wrinkles on my face. I put my hand up to smooth back my bun. “This great big beautiful laboratory of yours. Is it filled completely with radium?”

I laugh. “Oh goodness, no. I wish you were correct. We have but one gram housed here in my lab, and that is all we have in all of France. Not like you have in America. Fifty grams of radium!” My voices rises. “Four in Baltimore, six in Denver, seven in New York . . . shall I go on?” I know the location of every single gram of radium in the world.

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