If You Are There

by Susan Sherman

  Gabriel was about to order another shot when he realized he couldn’t pay for it. Instead he studied the photograph more carefully. Palladino’s head was thrown back and she was laughing. His brother was standing next to her with that mischievous grin on his face, the one Gabriel knew well from his childhood. He must’ve said something funny in that dry manner of his.

  A few pages later he came across another article. This one read: a sunday with the curies. The photograph showed a small gathering in the garden behind their house. Gabriel recognized Lucia sitting on a blanket with Madame Curie, Iréne, and two-year-old Ève, who looked nothing like her parents with her black hair and dark eyes. How happy everyone looked, how contented with their lives, and why shouldn’t they be? Their lives were successful, easy, and predictable—free of hardship and defeat.

  Gabriel went back to his flat to check his mailbox. The money had still not arrived and he still wanted that bottle of whiskey. It didn’t have to be good, just good enough to not make him sick.

  He decided to go out and earn the money. He waited for a couple of hours until the evening was well underway and then walked over to the Tête d’Orignal. The place was packed with students and a few well-heeled tourists, who came for the color.

  He was always welcome at the café. The piano was always his to play. He remembered the night when he met Lucia here. She brought him the photograph of the Curies, and he was on top of the world. Taillon had told him he was running the story on page four and that he should go out and celebrate. He remembered thinking how beautiful she looked that night, how terrible her singing was, and how much he wanted to be with her.

  He took a seat on the piano bench and began to play. The proprietor sent over a waiter with a whiskey and a plate containing a half franc silver coin. This was their bargain. The proprietor would loan Gabriel the coin to grease the crowd, knowing that at the end of evening it would be returned with a small percentage of his tips.

  It was a good bargain, even if it meant that Gabriel had been reduced to begging—or at least that’s how he saw it. He came to the café whenever he was in dire need, and played for several hours, anxious the whole time that his brother or some friends of his family would walk in and see him with his plate and his coins, a common musician playing for his supper. He could just imagine what his father would say if he ever found out.

  The whole time he was playing Gabriel kept an eye on the door. He could tell at a glance if someone had money and if they looked the sort to part with it. A few people like that came in during the night and left a tidy pile on his plate. He was playing a popular song, one that his friends asked for so often that it became a joke between them. A gathering had formed around the piano; everyone was singing along. He was on his second whiskey and feeling much better when a gloved hand reached through the crowd and dropped a two-franc silver coin on his plate. Gabriel had never gotten such a big tip. He looked up and his stomach dropped.

  “Gabriel.” Lucia Rutkowska was as surprised to see him as he was her. She went on in a faltering voice. “Madame Palladino wanted you to have this.”

  It was then he noticed the famous medium sitting in the corner of the room.

  He didn’t thank Lucia. He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t even look at her. She stood there a moment, her face flushed, then she muttered something under her breath that sounded like an apology and turned away. After that he ignored the protests of his friends who wanted him to finish the song. Without a word he got up and walked out the door, leaving the shot of whiskey and the plate full of coins on the piano.

  Gabriel had few sources left, making stories hard to come by. Some had disappeared, others had died, but many required a little something in exchange and Gabriel no longer had access to the fund that Taillon kept in his bottom left drawer. So they all dried up, until he had only one or two left, mostly lower-level bureaucrats in the Town Council.

  One of these was an ambitious clerk he had met at the Tête d’Orignal when they were both students. The fellow had risen up in the council and was now expected to be taken on by the prefect. He was a not-too-distant relation of the prefect, who needed men he could trust since he was perpetually under siege. Generally, this fellow’s information was pretty tame, office gossip and wishful thinking, nothing to get the notice of Taillon, but Gabriel was grateful that he had some place to go that afternoon and that maybe, by some miracle, it would lead somewhere.

  His mind began to spin out a warm fantasy. What if it was a good story, a brilliant story? He imagined a scandal in the council, bribery, embezzlement, something that would cause a stir. He could get his desk back, Taillon’s approbation, and a series of articles. What if it was good enough to run on page one? It could even earn a headline, eighteen-point bold type, where Lucia was bound to see it. All of Paris was bound to see it.

  The rain had turned into a downpour by the time Gabriel threaded his way through the afternoon traffic in the rue Danton. The street was noisy, as were most streets in Paris, because they were paved with wood or asphalt. The motors and the horse hooves set up a clamor and mixed with the cries of the peddlers and the jangle of the omnibuses. The sidewalk was so crowded that he had to take to the street several times just to get around. There he found himself dodging carriages and carts and trams rumbling by on their tracks. He was to meet this fellow at the Institute Library in the stacks where it was unlikely they would be seen. He got the idea his source liked the subterfuge, thinking it somehow lent importance to the meager information he was about to impart.

  Gabriel was late and in a hurry when he glanced up and saw a crowd forming in the place Dauphine. Traffic had stopped. People were standing frozen on the sidewalk, gloved hands covering open mouths in an expression of shock and eager fascination. A few bystanders began moving tentatively closer to the accident that had occurred a moment before.

  Gabriel’s journalistic instinct propelled him through the crowd even before the import of the tragedy had time to sink in. The driver of a delivery cart piled high with military uniforms was trying desperately to calm his horses. The horses were snorting and whickering, rearing and throwing up their heads, their eyes wide with fear.

  The crowd began to shout at the driver, accusing him of coming too fast off the bridge and recklessly knocking the man down. He was shouting back at them that he wasn’t going too fast, that the man had appeared out of nowhere and had frightened his horses.

  The man in question lay still under the cart; a rivulet of blood flowed into the street and mixed with a puddle of dirty water. Two gendarmes pushed their way through the crowd and helped the driver with the horses. Then they gently pulled the man out and that’s when Gabriel could see that the wheel had crushed his skull. The man was beyond help despite the efforts of the gendarmes to get him into a taxi and rush him to a hospital. Gabriel was only vaguely aware of their efforts as the taxi drivers turned them down, one after the other. No one wanted the bloody mess in their taxi.

  At first he was too stunned to react to the sight of the face, which he recognized at once. A great surge of sorrow washed over him as he bent down over the dead man. It was Pierre Curie, once alive and animated, now an inert body lying in the rain. His eyes open, his face still, peaceful, even gratified, as if the cart hit him just at the exact moment he had found the answer to a perplexing problem.

  It was instinct, automatic.

  By the time the gendarmes realized that no taxi driver would take the victim, Gabriel had filled up pages in his notebook with the horror of the crowd, the panicked horses, the cart piled with uniforms, the steady rain, the vein of blood in the street, and the dead man with his peaceful face and hideous injuries. Later, when he had time to think, he would realize what the precious notebook contained: the impressions of an eyewitness to the worst tragedy in a decade to strike the scientific community, the city, and the country at large.

  CHAPTER 13

  April 1906

  First to go was the breath—coming as it did in ragged g
asps, abandoning her lungs as fast as it filled them, leaving her weak-kneed and spent, as if she were laboring over an arduous task, which of course she was. She stood in the hallway, her legs threatening to buckle, her arms wrapped tightly around her middle, holding herself in, a tiny sliver of comfort found in the weight of her own arms.

  “Is he really dead?” Even when she heard the answer she couldn’t believe it. Not dead, surely. Not all the way.

  She had been out to Fontenay-aux-Roses with Iréne, to the school, walking the grounds, fresh leaves, lusty buds, the narcissus had just unfurled their blossoms, cheerful mounds of yellow and white bordering the path, a whiff of their tangy smell drifting in the air. She had no idea that anything was wrong. She still could not grasp it, not even after she returned home and was told. Not even after they offered her his bloody cap.

  She had talked with him just that morning. They lay in bed, his body pressed against hers, his arm around her waist, heavy and reassuring. She could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he whispered into her ear. They made plans to discuss his recent work with Eusapia Palladino. Lately, he had been more excited by his experiments with the medium than his work on radium. She became annoyed when he said he didn’t want to spend the day with them, that he wanted to go over his notes. That was only this morning, less than eight hours ago. How could so much change so quickly?

  They were out in the garden. She couldn’t remember how they got there. The doctor was beside her on the bench, holding his head, rocking back and forth. “What was he dreaming of this time?” he kept muttering over and over again.

  Somehow she got to her feet and began to walk into the field behind the Perrins’ yard, first in one direction then another, stumbling over the uneven ground, her shoes sinking into the muddy channels left from the downpour. What was she to do? How would she live without him? And what about the children, now without a father? Her stomach heaved and pitched. She dropped to her knees. Her love was gone. Her life, and everything that was familiar and safe. The ground had given way and she was falling from a great height. With nothing to break it she would fall forever. Then someone lifted her up, wrapped a firm arm around her back, and held her close.

  “What shall I do?”

  “You will go on. You will work and you have Iréne and little Ève.” It was Jean Perrin. He had his hand under her elbow and he walked her back to the house.

  “How can I work?”

  “You’ll find a way.”

  “How can I work without Pierre?”

  That night she sat alone in their room and wrote in her journal, telling Pierre about the accident, describing what had happened to his beautiful head, crushed beneath the wheel of the cart. She told him he was laid out in the back bedroom. She had wanted to wash him and lay him out herself, but they wouldn’t let her. They kept her from him until he was ready.

  She went on to describe their last days at the house in Saint-Rémy, taking walks in the countryside, picking a bouquet of blue wallflowers. She described leaving Paris with the girls. He had come to see them off and he nearly left them on the platform without saying good-bye. Then he joined them on that Saturday, and they went to the farm for milk. In the afternoon they went cycling with Iréne. He had to raise her seat because she had grown. He thought it strange that she had gotten so tall without him noticing.

  The doctor came in from time to time and tried to get her to go to sleep, but she knew she never would. She would never sleep again. She sat on the rug before the fire, holding his bloody cap, bits of him imbedded in the material: red bits and white bits, scattered bits of his precious mind. No one would take it from her. It was hers now. It was all she had left.

  Then Lulu was there, by her side. How did she know to come?

  “The doctor sent for me. I came as soon as I got the bleu.”

  “He’s gone, Lucynka.”

  “I know.”

  “How will I live? How can I go on without him?”

  “You have no choice. It won’t always be like this. You’ll find your way.” Lucia stroked her hair and held her in her arms. “It seems impossible now, but you will go on. You will never forget. You will always grieve, but you will heal.”

  Madame Curie laid her head on Lulu’s shoulder and for the moment was comforted. Zostań ze mną?. “Stay with me.”

  “As long as you need.”

  Then Lucia saw what her former mistress was holding in her hands. “Is that his cap?”

  She nodded.

  “We have to get you into bed now.”

  She started to protest, but Lucia helped her to her feet and walked her over to the bed. Once Madame Curie was lying down it was nothing to take the cap from her. When Lucia saw what it held she waited until Madame closed her eyes, until her breathing was even, and only then did she step over to the fire and lay it among the burning coals.

  A small gathering of family and friends arrived for the funeral. Madame Curie’s sister, Bronya, and her husband, Joseph, had traveled from Warsaw. Monsieur’s brother Jacques gave Lucia a start, because he looked so much like Monsieur. Ève ran through the rooms shouting nonsensical orders at everyone. Lucia brought her into the kitchen and gave her a good breakfast. Unlike her sister, Iréne, she ate everything on her plate, then asked for more.

  The others knew Lucia only as a servant and didn’t know quite what to do with her new station. When Henriette Perrin spilled her tea, she asked Lucia to get a cloth without thinking. Then, realizing her mistake, she colored and apologized, and looked helpless as she tried to mop up the tea with a handkerchief. Lucia assured her it was nothing and went into the kitchen for a rag.

  Lucia sat with Madame Curie in the back bedroom where Monsieur was laid out. They spoke little, taking comfort in each other’s presence while Madame Curie held Monsieur’s hand. Occasionally, she would remember something that Pierre had been working on that she would have to complete: a letter to the Hôtel des Sociétiés Savantes summing up his views on legislation concerning accidents in the laboratories, his paper on the need for more science education, and his correspondence with Morris Arlington and other members of the Society for Psychical Research regarding his work with Eusapia Palladino.

  Madame Curie lifted her eyes at the sound of the men arriving from the cemetery. Heavy footfalls in the parlor, hushed voices in the kitchen, and then, moments later, the doctor came in with a black cloth draped over his arm, ready to lay it over the coffin.

  “No,” Madame Curie said in alarm. “I don’t want it. I want flowers.”

  “We don’t have flowers, Marie. And they’re waiting. Everyone is waiting.”

  “I don’t care. Let them wait.” She rose. “Help me, Lulu. Hurry, before they take him away.”

  She led the way through the kitchen and out into the yard where they went to work picking a basket of daylilies and early lilacs. They brought the flowers back in, made bouquets, and covered the coffin with them. When Madame Curie was satisfied, Lucia helped her with her hat and veil, took her hand, and led her out to the parlor.

  The funeral was supposed to be limited to only those close to the family, but word had gotten out and a large crowd had assembled in the cemetery waiting for the proceedings to begin. Madame Curie hid behind her veil and leaned on the arm of Dr. Curie on one side and Jacques on the other. They brought her down to the grave site where a secular official in a black robe presided over a simple ceremony.

  Afterward, friends got up to speak, offering testaments to Pierre Curie’s achievements, his dedication to science, his authenticity and generous spirit. During the remarks Lucia’s mind wandered. She remembered the day Monsieur taught her how to ride a bicycle on a summer holiday in Le Pouldu. They rode along the Brittany coast, her front wheel wobbling, alarming at first, but then when she got the hang of it, she understood the appeal—the freedom, the sea stretching out to the horizon, a flat blue plate bordered by rocky beaches, the women working the oyster beds, their skirts tucked into their waistbands.

  T
oward the end Lucia looked up and saw Gabriel Richet standing halfway up the slope, among a group of journalists. She turned away, hoping that he had not seen her. She did not want to talk to him, not after the story he wrote about the accident. It made the headlines and was reprinted around the world. It wasn’t anything he said in the article. He was kind to Monsieur. It was the fact that someone had profited from Monsieur’s death, and that person happened to be Gabriel Richet.

  After the remarks, after the coffin was lowered into the ground and friends and family had gathered around the widow, Lucia walked back up the grassy slope with Madame and the doctor toward the waiting taxi. When they passed the clump of reporters on the hill, she glanced over and found Gabriel watching her with a look of concern and possibly even contrition. She held his gaze for a moment or two, until it seemed as if he wanted to come over, and then she let her eyes drift away.

  That night Lucia stayed with Madame Curie until she fell asleep. The whole house was sleeping. Even from the landing she could hear the doctor snoring in the back bedroom. She went down to the kitchen and lit the stove. She put the kettle on and while she stood there waiting for the water to boil she glanced around the room. Even though she had been back to this kitchen many times in the past two years, for some reason, that night, she came to it with a fresh eye. There were the pots and pans hanging on their hooks, their shapes outlined on the wall. There was the stained sink smelling faintly of bleach, the cracked linoleum floor dull from hundreds of washings, the saltshakers she had bought in the market, all the utensils she once took for granted: bent measuring spoons, a food grinder, chipped mixing bowls, and a broken whisk that still worked if you weren’t in a hurry.

  She brought her tea over to the table and blew on it. The doctor must have turned over in his sleep for the snoring had stopped. The house was quiet.