If You Are There

by Susan Sherman

  Lucia was surprised and pleased to find a respectable lobby that smelled of learning: of old books, stuffy laboratories, and floor wax. She was further encouraged by a glass case that displayed portraits of men looking grave and brilliant in their old-fashioned suits. She took them to be famous scientists and was relieved by their presence. She thought that if they worked here once, then it must be a promising place for the Curies. Perhaps her employers would be famous one day, and she would be the cook of famous scientists? Babusia would be so proud.

  The doctor led the way through the building and out into the courtyard at the back. Across the yard sat a derelict shed, its glass skylight gleaming as the sun made a brief appearance through the fortress of clouds. An odd figure bundled up against the cold stood over a smelting basin that sat on an iron grate over an open fire. The woman toiled to stir the contents of the basin with a heavy iron bar and looked to the world like the washerwomen who boiled their laundry in vats on the washing boats moored on the river. Lucia didn’t recognize her, not until the doctor called out. Marie Curie glanced up and looked surprised. Then she gave them a little wave but didn’t come over to greet them. Instead, she continued to stir the basin until, almost reluctantly, she heaved the iron bar out of the pot and left it propped up against a barrel. When she came over to them Lucia saw that she wore an acid-stained smock; her wild, wind-blown hair was flecked with snow and matted with rain; her fingers were stained black; and her eyes were red-rimmed and watering.

  “Mé! Mé!” Iréne called out, holding out her chubby arms, impatient to be scooped up by her mother. Madame took her daughter and held her close. She kissed her forehead and then her cheek. Over the top of her head she said: “You shouldn’t have brought her here, Papa.”

  “Nonsense. She wants to be with her mother.”

  “You know I cannot leave my work.”

  “You can leave it for a few minutes. Have some tea with us. It will do you good to get out of the cold.”

  Madame brushed her lips across Iréne’s forehead and kissed her fingers. Then she took one last look at her bubbling smelting pot and grudgingly led the way into the shed where Lucia hoped they could get warm.

  The shed was even more miserable than the courtyard. There was a fire going in the stove, but something had to be wrong with it. It was nearly red-hot, yet it didn’t give off much heat. Battered pine tables held glass beakers; racks of test tubes; a piece of equipment made of wires, cylinders, and metal poles; and several rows of shallow porcelain dishes containing some kind of solution.

  Iréne wiggled out of her mother’s arms and went for the shelves that held great glass jars filled with liquid. Lucia picked her up before she could get too far and when she began to whine and squirm, Lucia put her down and held her hand while they walked around room. They took in everything: the jars of liquid packed in baskets filled with straw, the scientific instruments, and the mountain of bulging burlap sacks that reached almost to the ceiling. One of the sacks lay open on the ground, spilling brown dust mixed with pine needles out on the broken asphalt floor. Here and there the dust had turned to mud where water had leaked in through the skylight.

  Monsieur had been at the chalkboard but left it without complaint. He cleared away a table so they could have their tea. Madame Curie seemed distracted and impatient. She drank her cup absently, her eyes on the iron basin out in the yard as it continued to boil and bubble and give off a confused cloud of smoke and steam. Lucia didn’t know much about science, but she did know a thing or two about a bubbling pot.

  “Would you like me to tend it for you, madame?”

  “It is not necessary. You’ll be going soon.” She said this looking pointedly at her father-in-law.

  The doctor was good at ignoring her looks. “Why not let her do it, Marie. She can stir a pot.”

  “I tend to pots every day, madame. It’s no bother.”

  “This is not cooking, Lulu.”

  “You don’t mind do you, Lulu?” the doctor insisted. Lucia shook her head.

  Madame Curie sighed. After a moment or two, she reluctantly gave Lucia a nod, sending her out into the cold.

  Lucia smelled the muck the moment she stepped out into the courtyard. It smelled like a witches’ brew of corruption, something that should have been buried at midnight and sprinkled with salt. She forced herself to cross the courtyard. Scant flakes of snow were already falling as she lowered the iron bar into the boiling slurry. The fumes wafting up from the basin burned her throat and stung her eyes. She choked on the toxic cloud and fought to keep her eyes open, even though they felt as if they were filled with ground glass. She moved to the left and then to the right, trying to stay out of the shifting wind. Sometimes she’d get it wrong and then it was a struggle just to catch a breath. Coughing and gasping, with tears streaming her cheeks, she wondered how Madame Curie had done it all these weeks.

  By the time they left Marie was back at the fire stirring the boiling mass in the basin. It was a leaden afternoon, the sun nothing more than a soggy orb in the sky no brighter than the moon. She gripped the heavy iron bar, her hands beginning to cramp, eyeing the clouds with suspicion. She cursed the weather when it began to snow in earnest and hunched her shoulders against the cold. She did not fancy standing out in a snowstorm. She stood in one the week before and did not relish doing it again. Nevertheless, she knew that even if there was a blizzard and even if her hands and feet froze, she would not desert the work. It was small comfort that this fevered loyalty brought on a warming rush of emotion that, for the moment at least, gave her some relief.

  Without warning the wind shifted again, sending the smoke in Marie’s direction, but this time she was too quick for it. She stepped out of the way and turned her back on it while still continuing to stir the slurry. She could see by its consistency and by the way it was behaving over the flame that it was nearly complete. Pierre had returned to his work as well. She could see him through the glass seated at a table surrounded by the odd assortment of tubes, pipes, coils, and wires that made up the equipment he built himself.

  He really was a gifted physicist. The way he stepped into a problem and inhabited it. He could live inside of it as if it were a house, going from room to room, exploring it from the inside and then stepping out to gain a whole new perspective. She never thought of herself as gifted, only that she was a hard worker. Still, it was gratifying the way he relied on her and appreciated all that she brought to their partnership. Whenever there was a problem of mathematics, he would always say: Ask Marie. She’ll know what to do.

  This was the way they worked together in a state of almost complete absorption. This was their home, not a physical space, but a place all the same, just big enough for the two of them. Here, in this miserable shed—their affectionate term for the hangar—they worked in tandem. Marie labored with twenty-five kilos of pitchblende residue at a time, reducing down the chemical makeup, hunting for radium in barium chloride.

  The residue was the by-product of uranium extraction, the dust, dirt, and pine needles left after the first reductions. It was thought to be worthless and left in piles on the forest floor not far from the chemical plant. It was not worthless, however, at least not to the Curies. To them it was precious, buried treasure; it was radium, their progeny, a sibling to Iréne.

  While Marie labored to isolate radium, Pierre studied the properties of the rays it emitted. Each day the Curies were thrilled, frustrated, and amazed by all the tricks their rays could do. Each night they returned home broken by fatigue but buoyed up by curiosity and a steadfast commitment to isolate the radium salts and hold it in their hands.

  Marie was confident that through these reductions and fractional crystallizations she could tease out enough radium to get an atomic weight. Once that happened it would be added to the periodic table and no one could refute their claim to the new element. It would be theirs, their sole achievement, provided of course, they got there first.

  When the solution was done, she put on t
he smelter’s gloves, braced her legs, and lifted the iron basin off the fire. She struggled under the weight of it as she lugged it into the hangar, where she and Pierre poured it into a great glass vessel. There it would sit until the solution separated and the less soluble material could be collected and further reduced through chemical washings and fractionations.

  Since it was late Marie made them tea and they sat by the stove, their hands warming on the steaming mugs. This was a particularly enjoyable time of the afternoon when most of the work was done and they could take an inventory of the day, speculating on the outcome of their research: on the possibilities, the applications, the implications for physics and the nature of matter and its effect on energy.

  Pierre was finding that these rays could penetrate certain materials. Some could penetrate glass or foil, others thicker materials. What’s more they could induce radioactivity in other substances. As a result, their hangar had become quite active, which was confusing their research, as it became difficult to pinpoint the exact source of the radiation. It was frustrating but, at the same time, exciting. Pierre had begun to pace, as he often did when he was trying on a new notion. He had just discovered that radiation could color glass.

  Marie never sat idle for long. She didn’t have a minute to waste. She wondered if Rutherford, Schmidt, or Villari ever took time to drink a cup of tea. Somehow she didn’t think so. “Hounds at our heels, Pierre,” she often said, referring to her rivals: the New Zealander, German, and Italian—although she knew he did not share her urgency to be the first.

  The tea was still hot when she put it down and crossed to the table where a row of porcelain evaporating basins sat out of the way of the leaking roof. She had been watching these fractions because she had somehow managed to keep them free of wood ash and coal dust. One particular basin held an intricate construct of barium crystals that she wanted to collect and measure before she and her husband left for the day. She picked up the bowl and began to carry it across the uneven asphalt floor to Pierre’s quadrant electrometer that she had hooked up to an ionization chamber.

  The chamber consisted of two metal plates, one higher than the other. On the lower plate she would place the barium crystals now in powder form. The rays emitted by this radioactive powder would cause the air molecules to release electrons, which, in turn, would create a weak electrical current that flowed between the metal plates. This current would continue to flow along a wire that had been connected to the electrometer. There it would move a needle that had been attached to a mirror. By throwing a ray of light on the mirror she could watch the needle move along a graduated dial and in this way begin to take a measurement of the current.

  It was a delicate operation that required Marie to sit for hours, rigid, fully engaged, holding a chronometer in one hand and weights in the other. At her side a piezoelectric quartz was stretched and weighted by a series of small weights. When stretched, the quartz emitted an infinitesimal current that could be measured reliably. By comparing the two currents over an exact unit of time, a precise measurement of the radioactivity of the barium could be taken.

  It took absolute concentration. The wrist and arm had to remain flexible while adding and removing the weights from the quartz until the current emitted by the quartz matched the current emitted by the barium. Pierre liked to brag that only his wife knew how to take these measurements and challenged their friends to try to match her. None could.

  “How can we work like this, Marie? The equipment is active, our clothes are active, everything is active. It’s impossible.”

  “We’ll manage, my love.”

  “We need a new laboratory. Surely, you can see that.”

  “And how can we do that?”

  “We have to do it. It’s affecting out calculations. We can’t work like this.”

  “It’s just a problem, Pierre. Not a disaster,” she said, keeping her eyes on the fragile crystals as she navigated the floor. She was only half listening. He was right, of course, but there was nothing to be done about it. They didn’t have the money and that was that.

  Her mind drifted back to a dinner they had gone to the other night honoring Henri Becquerel and the work he had done on the rays. During the speeches she had amused herself by calculating the laboratories that could be built from the sale of diamonds worn by the society women that night.

  It was just a flick, a momentary stumble. Her toe grazed the edge of a broken slab of asphalt, but she overcompensated and a moment later the contents of the basin, two months of killing work, spilled out on the offending floor.

  She stood there holding the empty evaporating bowl, stunned by the enormity of the loss. “Pierre,” she choked.

  He froze while he took it in, the white solution against the black asphalt. Then he came and put his arms around her. He didn’t say anything at first. He let her rail against the floor, against the shed and their deplorable working conditions. He let her cry more from exhaustion than from loss. Finally, when she had spent her misery and frustration, she buried her face against his chest, taking a kind of primordial comfort from his warmth, the beating of his heart, and his familiar smell, wood smoke and kerosene.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked.

  “We are going to go on.”

  “But we are running out of time.”

  “We’ll be all right, Marie. Things will come right, if you let them.” He looked down at her with an expression that was at once sad, slightly confused, and so authentic it was heartbreaking. She wanted to tell him how much she loved him, but no spoken language could encompass all that she felt.

  She tilted her face up to be kissed. “No words,” she said gently.

  He wiped the soot from her chin and leaned down to kiss her. “No words,” he murmured, which was their code for love.

  That night Iréne sat in her high chair and played with her food. She threw it on the floor, mashed it into her little fist, and smeared it into her hair. She found a number of uses for it, but none of them included putting it into her mouth. Lucia tried to make a game of it. She made funny faces, imitated a chicken, but nothing would induce the child to eat. Finally, she had to admit defeat and give her tapioca pudding and pippins.

  The Curies came home late. Now that Lucia knew more about what Madame Curie did all day, she understood why she came home each night half destroyed by the work.

  “She has been calling for you, madame,” Lucia said, taking their coats at the door. “She won’t go to sleep until you go in.”

  Monsieur was already at the table laying out the laboratory notebooks. As usual, he grumbled about his wife going in to see their child.

  “Did she have a proper supper?” Madame Curie asked Lucia.

  “I tried, Madame. I really did. But all she wanted was her tapioca and pippins.”

  “Oh, Lulu,” she said, sounding annoyed and disappointed. “The one thing I asked you to do.”

  The doctor looked up from his medical journal. “She tried, Marie. I saw her. The child is stubborn. She takes after her mother.”

  Madame Curie gave him a look and went in to see her daughter, while Lucia stood there feeling scorched and flat.

  “She’s tired, Lulu,” the doctor said gently. “You mustn’t take it to heart.”

  “Yes, monsieur,” she managed to say, before retreating to the kitchen.

  She put their supper in the oven to warm and slumped over the kitchen table, dropping her chin on her hands. Nothing would please them. It did not matter if the flue was clean, if the stove was polished. She could serve thin soup and stale bread and none of it would make a bit of difference. Why did she even bother?

  She swept a small pile of breadcrumbs into her palm and threw them into the sink. Then she opened up the oven door and bent down to retrieve their supper. She had had enough of their poverty and their dedication to hard work, enough of washing their threadbare clothes, and looking at their exhausted gray faces. They were wearing her out.

  She could hear t
hem at the table going over their computations in the notebook. They were animated and excited, as they usually were whenever they went over the day’s work. In the past she liked listening to them as they spun off each other’s ideas. What if? they would say to each other: What if the atom isn’t immutable?

  Immutable.

  “What if there are smaller particles within it? What if these smaller particles are in flux? What if it is this flux that causes the energy?” They spoke a foreign language that Lucia could not understand. Theirs was the language of mathematics. Still, she understood and admired their excitement.

  “We have the first two, Marie,” Monsieur was saying as Lucia came in to serve their supper. “But it’s the third that interests me.”

  “Villiard’s.”

  “Rutherford’s calling it Gamma.”

  “Gamma. Is it ionizing?”

  “Yes, but it’s not like the others and it’s penetrating, even a few centimeters of lead won’t stop it. Not entirely. Here, look at this.”

  Madame bent over the notebook. Her dinner remained untouched. She looked up briefly. “On the magnetic field?”

  “And the electronic too.”

  She studied the figures again and then lifted her head. “No effect.”

  He smiled at her. After that came a flurry of calculations that sent Lucia back to the kitchen.

  She spent the rest of the evening scrubbing the pans and putting away the dishes. When she was finished she found that the slop bucket was full again, despite emptying it only that afternoon. Since there was no kitchen maid to take it down Lucia threw a shawl around her shoulders and tramped down the three flights of stairs to the courtyard. She muttered to herself the whole way down.