Only until we find an acceptable nanny, Hela insisted.
But I quite enjoyed her baby smells, and her baby toes, and her baby cuddles, and I did not feel in any rush for Hela to find someone else. Besides, Dr. Curie showed up many weekdays to spend time with his granddaughter and insisted I go out, enjoy the summer in France, the gardens and the sites with Klara.
When Kaz wrote me to ask when I might be coming home—I had already delayed my train ticket twice—I wrote back that Hela needed my help still. I consoled myself with the fact that it was only partially a lie. Kaz wrote that he missed me and Klara desperately, and I told him we missed him too. Klara missed him and asked about him often. But I was busy in Paris, surrounded by my family and by the beauty and culture of the city. And except for when his letters came, or when Klara asked, I didn’t remember to miss Kaz very much at all.
ON SATURDAYS IN JUNE, I TOOK BICYCLE RIDES WITH PIERRE. He brought Jacques’s old fixed-up bicycle to my sister’s house on boulevard Kellerman, with the intent that I could use it to sightsee with him, to ride and learn the city firsthand from a native Parisian.
“Goodness,” Hela exclaimed, eyeing the rusty old frame. “I can give you some francs to hire a carriage instead.”
“Your sister enjoys this,” Pierre insisted to Hela, who stared at me, eyebrows raised.
“I do,” I acknowledged. “I don’t even own a bicycle in Poland, and besides, the streets are too narrow to ride with all the carriages in Loksow, I’d be killed.”
She shrugged, not at all understanding the appeal. She preferred riding a carriage, even over walking, because she claimed walking required too much of her attention to stay alive on the way to her destination. She preferred to think problems through in her head while someone else got her from place to place. But I quite enjoyed moving myself, pushing hard against the pedals until my legs ached and I felt the wind tangling my hair.
One Saturday near the end of June, Pierre offered to show me the Bois de Vincennes, a spectacular park in the middle of Paris. He pointed in the right direction, and I pedaled out ahead of him, my hair coming loose from my bun, blowing back behind my shoulders as the wind whipped around my face.
“Slow down,” Pierre called from behind me. But he was laughing.
I was breathless and sweating, but I pedaled and I pedaled like fire. Past the gates of the park and the blossoming cherry trees. Until we neared the water, and I slowed down.
I hopped off, lay the bicycle on its side, and sat down by the edge of the lake, resting my sweaty face against the cool edge of my sleeve. Pierre was a moment behind me, and when he stopped, he pulled a bouquet of white daisies from his bicycle basket, then held them out to me, like a prize for reaching the lake first. I took the flowers and our fingertips touched, sending a current of warmth up my hand, my entire arm.
“Tell me more about your experiments,” I said, lying back against the edge of the lake, half closing my eyes, holding the flowers to my chest.
Pierre had already regaled me last Saturday with a tale from his small corner of Jacques’s and Hela’s laboratory. He had become obsessed with Becquerel’s rays this past year, and theorized that there was an undiscovered element inside the pitchblende Hela and Jacques were studying. He’d even gotten astonishing results after placing it in an ionization chamber he’d fashioned himself out of used grocery crates. But Jacques thought the readings must be wrong, that Pierre was a touch crazy, and Pierre did not have the funding to further the experimentation on his own.
“You should’ve seen the readings, Marya,” he said now, his voice far away. “The radioactivity was higher than anything I’ve ever seen before.” I nodded. “What would you do next if you were me?”
I liked feeling that he truly believed that I could wrap my mind around everything he was sharing with me, and that he was asking for my advice, that somehow we were equals, though I was only self-taught in physics and chemistry and had read up on the latest research only when Hela sent the papers to me. “Well,” I said. “Is there a way for you to isolate this new element? People cannot deny what they can see and touch themselves, can they?”
“Not even Jacques,” he said softly. Then he added, “I don’t know. It would be a laborious undertaking. I only have a small space in the laboratory, and I’m not as young as I used to be, you know?”
I smiled. “None of us are, are we? But you have to try, Pierre. If you really believe you have happened upon a new discovery, this new… element. You have to try. For the sake of scientific advancement.”
He stroked his beard with his fingers, lay back against his elbows, and stared out across the lake. Neither one of us spoke for a little while, and then suddenly out of nowhere, Pierre said, “Perhaps you could always stay in Paris?”
I laughed a little, held the flowers to my nose, inhaling their intoxicating scent.
PERHAPS I COULD ALWAYS STAY IN PARIS.
I imagined it in my head at night, lying in bed, in the moments before drifting off to sleep.
What would I do here? At thirty-eight, and having Klara, I was too old, too busy mothering, to get my degree at the Sorbonne now. Perhaps I could help Pierre in the lab, or, assist Hela and Jacques. When they spoke of their work at dinner, I could only truly understand the half of what they were doing, even though I nodded along as if I understood it all. They would have no need for me, untrained and unskilled for their experiments.
I could learn, though. I still loved to learn.
And how would Kaz fit in to my imagined life? He could work on publishing Hipolit’s research here as easily as he could in Poland, but he did not speak French, and I did not think he could get a teaching job here without that. And we would not have money to live on, without him having a job.
But we did not need money, in this imagined life. My fantasy life was a life of flowers and sunshine and bicycle rides. A life with all the kindness of the Curies and no worry about food or money, or the revolution in the streets outside my Polish apartment.
IN THE BEGINNING OF JULY, A LETTER CAME IN THE POST FOR me from Agata.
The revolution was ongoing in Poland, yet things had changed in the past week. The school strike was finally over, and women were now legally allowed a higher education. After all this time, all these years. I could hardly believe it! The news made me so excited, I felt it deep inside of me, a lightness.
Hurry back, Agata wrote. We can build our women’s university out in the open now. There is so much to be done, Marya!
And as quick as my Parisian fantasy had come to me, it disappeared. Hela had named her daughter after me, a revolutionary, whom she admired for educating women in Poland. I could not be that woman if I stayed here, if I daydreamed my life away in Hela’s guestroom.
I hugged and kissed Hela and Jacques and baby Marie goodbye. Pierre and Dr. Curie were back in Sceaux, where Dr. Curie had come down with a summer cold and Pierre was looking after him. I thought about stopping there, on the way to the train, but it wasn’t on the way at all. It was, in fact, quite out of the way, and besides I did not want Klara to catch a cold before our trip. “Tell Pierre and Dr. Curie we said goodbye,” I told Hela instead, and she promised she would.
Then Klara and I took a carriage to the Gare du Nord, got on the train, and watched the city of Paris fade away into the summer morning, behind us.
Marie
Paris & Warsaw, 1906
The girls and Dr. Curie and I move into an unremarkable house on rue Chemin de Fer in Sceaux. It is not as nice or modern as our house on boulevard Kellerman was, but at least it is quieter here than in the city. And the backyard has a garden for the children to play and Irène to plant seeds. We are far from our neighbors, and perhaps in time I will miss having the Perrins and Langevins nearby, but now I am quite happy to be left alone.