If You Are There Page 18

  When she saw the worry on his face, she paused. “She will recover, monsieur. But it will take some time.”

  He nodded slowly while he took it in. “Yes, I understand. I’ll tell my editor he won’t be getting that photograph. Let her know I came by, if you think it would help. That I wish her well. I know I can’t offer much, but if there is anything . . .” He left it at that.

  She thanked him, and he turned to leave. But before he could reach the gate she called out to him. “I might be able to help you.”

  Three days later Lucia walked into a little café in rue de la Glacière, a few blocks from the École Normale Supérieure. It was crowded with university students, young men mostly, but a few girls in starched white shirtwaists and straight dark skirts. They sat at the tables alone or in groups with their books open or deep in conversation about politics, philosophy, or economics. Many of the young men eyed her when she walked in. It thrilled her to think that they might mistake her for a university student. Maybe they thought her market basket held books.

  She didn’t see Gabriel at first and it wasn’t until she went into the next room that she found him seated at a little table in an alcove by the front window. He jumped up when he saw her and held out a chair for her. Then he took the one opposite.

  “How is Madame Curie?”

  “Better. She has been going out to the garden.”

  He gave her a brief smile and looked relieved. “Did you bring it?” he asked.

  She pulled out the photograph from her market basket and handed it over. It was still in its simple wood frame. It was a picture of Monsieur and Madame Curie on their bicycles. Madame Curie’s basket was decorated with flowers.

  “It’s their wedding photograph. Doctor Curie says you may have it for a day, but then you must bring it right back.”

  Gabriel nodded while he studied it. He held it as if it were a piece of the True Cross, then he looked up at her. “It’s perfect. It’ll make the article.” He let her know how grateful he was and how much this meant to him. He was in high spirits, not only because of the photograph, but because he had just come from his office where he learned that the article would run on page four.

  “Even my editor liked it,” he said, beaming. “And he rarely likes anything.”

  After that he ordered coffee that arrived in stained cups with a plate of indifferent biscuits and store-bought jam, but none of that mattered, because she was sitting there with Gabriel Richet, in a students’ café with pictures of famous writers on the wall and a bust of Hugo in the corner under a moose head. She wished Gabriel had brought his camera and tripod. She would’ve asked him to take a picture of her so she could send it to Babusia. How excited she would be when it arrived. Look at my granddaughter, she would say to the women on the road. Look how far she has come. She would remind everyone in the village how she predicted it, how it was God’s will, and how she had seen the signs.

  A few students had gathered around an upright piano in the corner. One of them began to play a song that Lucia knew well from the café-concerts. It was popular all over Paris, on the street and in the markets. A couple of students hung over the piano and sang along. The pianist wasn’t very good and kept stumbling over the keys. The singers grew impatient and taunted him, which he gave back with relish, saying he would play better if they knew how to sing. Finally, the taller of the two with a thatch of black hair that kept falling into his eyes dragged his comrade off the bench and called out to Gabriel.

  “Help us out here, Richet. Bourbeau is hopeless.” When Gabriel waved them off, the student whined: “Don’t be like that. Be a sport. We want a song.”

  Gabriel dropped his chin on his hand. “They won’t leave me alone. I used to come here all the time when I was a student.”

  “Why don’t you play for them?” Lucia replied.

  “You like Ravel?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll play for you.”

  Gabriel took his place at the piano. He played entirely without effort, as if he had been doing so all his life. The students were right. He was good. He played one of Ravel’s new songs, one that she hadn’t heard before. The students joined in and soon their singing filled the café.

  When it was over they prodded him to play another. He tried to put them off, but they wouldn’t let him go. They badgered him until he finally agreed to play one more, but only if his friend consented to join in.

  Lucia was grateful for the many gifts that God had given her. She was an exceptional cook, she had beautiful hair, and an extensive vocabulary even in French, but singing was not one of her talents. In fact, she was so bad that it became a joke at school. Even Mademoiselle Wolfowitz, who admired her abilities in arithmetic, writing, and history, always put her in the back row during concerts. There she would stand behind Marysia Malinowska, the best singer in the class, with strict instructions to mouth the words but never sing.

  Lucia shook her head and waved off the crowd who was urging her to sing with them. They became adamant when Gabriel refused to play another note until she joined them. She got up determined to mouth the words silently, but when he started to play and the new Ravel song moved through her like a gorgeous wind, it came to her that she was in a Paris café, among a group of student singing under a moose head, next to the bust of Victor Hugo, not five blocks from the Sorbonne. She got caught up in the moment and forgot herself in degrees. She began to sing softly at first, but then with more enthusiasm, not quite with abandon, but certainly loud enough to be heard.

  At first Gabriel cocked his head and gave her a quizzical look. Then he looked down at the keys and suppressed a smile. He seemed to be thoroughly enjoying her performance. His playing became more animated and she thought she saw him laugh. He was laughing at her, but she didn’t mind. She was laughing too.

  Afterward, he walked her to the omnibus stop.

  “You have an extraordinary voice,” he said with a grin.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” she said with mock gravity.

  “Remarkably so.” They looked at each other and laughed. He took her hand and they crossed the street. He stayed with her until the omnibus arrived. Then he gave the driver a coin and helped her up. “I’ll bring it by, tomorrow,” he said with that careless, confident smile. He held up the photograph and mouthed thank you as the omnibus dipped back into traffic.

  All through the fall there were good days and bad. Sometimes Lucia would come up and find Madame Curie dressed and ready to go. On other days she would have to drag her out of bed. They called it putting her together. “Come put me together, Lulu,” Madame Curie would say. On bad days she would say nothing, except for the usual complaints when Lucia insisted she get up and face the morning. Even on good days Lucia walked Madame Curie to the station so she could catch her train to Sèvres. Sometimes she would take Lucia’s hand, other times she would be lost in thought. “I’m having a think, Lulu,” Madame would say. This meant that Lucia had to be quiet, so Madame could puzzle out questions about physics or chemistry or the classes she was teaching, and that was a good sign.

  Often in the afternoons when Madame Curie wasn’t teaching, they would sit over a cup of tea at the little table in the kitchen and Madame would share stories about her childhood in Warsaw. They spoke Polish, and both seemed to take comfort in that. Lucia would try to steer the conversation away from the history of death in Madame’s family, her mother and her older sister, but invariably they would come around to the recent loss of her father and of course her baby girl. Lucia believed that all this brooding wasn’t healthy. It always seemed to lead Madame back to her chief concern, her husband’s health. She fretted about his pain and the fact that he wasn’t getting any better despite the doctors and their cures.

  Lucia wanted to be more reassuring, but she knew her mistress and knew that Madame Curie would rather have the truth, no matter how difficult, than attempts to placate her with easy reassurances and hollow optimism. The truth was Monsieur was not getting
better. He was growing weaker and the pain was getting worse. So, rather than pretend, Lucia would say nothing. Inevitably, they would lapse into silence and then it was up to her to fill the void with neighborhood gossip, news of Iréne, or the daily business of running the household.

  She often accompanied the doctor and Iréne to the park even when the weather changed and the air took on a chill and the last leaves of autumn clung to the bare branches with a fierce resolve. It was late in the afternoon and they were sitting on a bench by the lake. Iréne was perched on a boulder at their feet poking at a dead beetle being devoured by ants.

  Lucia glanced up and saw a woman across the lake racing along the path, hatless, without a coat, her black dress billowing out behind her, creating a stir among the visitors in the park.

  “Who is that, Lucia?” asked the doctor.

  It was Madame Curie running toward them as if chased by all the demons in hell.

  “You have to stop him, Papa. He’s going to give it all away.” She was out of breath, her face flushed, her voice catching on the tears.

  “First you must sit down, Marie. You are overwrought.”

  She started to argue with him but thought better of it and did as she was told.

  “Now, tell me. What is this about?”

  “He got a letter from Mittag-Leffler.”

  “About the prize?”

  “They only want to give it to Pierre and Becquerel. They’re saying that he and Becquerel isolated radium together.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Of course it’s a lie. Pierre thinks this is Becquerel’s doing. He wants to refuse it, Papa. You have to speak to him.”

  “He should refuse it. They are not including you.”

  “Papa, we’re talking about the Nobel Prize.”

  “It’s just a prize, Marie. You get them all the time.”

  “It’s not the prize, Papa. It’s the money. It is seventy thousand gold francs. Do you know what we could do with seventy thousand francs? A laboratory. A real laboratory.”

  “But they are not acknowledging your work.”

  “I do not care. I want the laboratory. It’s the work that matters, not all this pompous drivel.”

  Lucia took her hand and began to talk to her in a quiet, soothing manner. “It will be all right, Madame. They cannot do you such an injustice, not with the whole world watching. There will be an outcry, you’ll see. The scientists won’t stand for it. Monsieur won’t have to turn it down.” This seemed to calm Madame Curie, at least for the moment. Lucia brushed a leaf out of her hair. “Come now we must get Iréne home.”

  In November a letter came for Monsieur Curie by way of a special post. Lucia saw that it was from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She showed it to the doctor, who weighed it in his hand.

  “Shall we open it?” he said with an impish smile. Lucia shook her head. He sighed. “No, you’re right, ma bonne fille. I guess we’ll just have to wait until they come home.”

  Marie came home first from Sevrès. Teaching was taking its toll on her health. She walked in looking gray and exhausted, until she saw the letter waiting on the hall table. She stood there staring at the name on the envelope.

  “Well, aren’t you going to open it?” the doctor asked, impatiently.

  “It’s addressed to Pierre.”

  “Do you really think he would mind?”

  She hesitated, but only for a moment, and then tore it open. She read it quickly and handed it to the doctor. When he read it he yelped in jubilation. Then he hugged her, nearly lifting her off the floor.

  At first she seemed too excited to speak. Her color was back and her eyes were blazing. “All that money,” she whispered.

  The doctor kissed her on both cheeks. “Well done, my girl. They’re doing the right thing. Not the idiots I thought.”

  But soon her grin faded and her brow furrowed. “They want us to go Sweden to meet the king. Do we have to go?”

  “Not now. Tell them you’ll come next year. Tell them you are not well.”

  “Yes, of course,” she breathed. Then she hugged Lucia. “You were right, my clever girl. I’ll have to listen to you from now on.” She clapped her hands once. “Where is Pierre?” She grabbed her coat off the rack. “I must find him. I cannot sit still.”

  That evening the Curies stayed up late drawing plans for a new laboratory and making lists of equipment they would buy to fill it. Lucia found these lists in the morning and made a neat pile of them before going off to the market. There she bought ready-made croissants, because no one would notice.

  When she saw the crowd that had gathered outside the front gate she assumed something horrible had happened. Her first thought was for her mistress. These men weren’t scientists. They spoke too loudly, too quickly, and without thought. Some were carrying tripods with cameras affixed to them. They asked her questions, a mob of eager, hungry faces: Who was she? Did she live with the Curies? Were the Curies at home? Would they come out soon? They were reporters and they wanted to know about the Curies and how it felt to win the Nobel Prize.

  In the beginning neither Monsieur nor Madame nor the doctor understood the enormity of the event. They thought it would be like it was after Gabriel’s article came out in Le Matin, a bright flash of recognition and then a return to normalcy. But this was something else. Monsieur bought a new pair of shoes, but only because Madame insisted. Madame Curie made plans to wallpaper the back bedroom and brought home a book of samples. Even during those first few days when reporters and photographers began to show up at the gate, the Curies assumed they could be sent away. Then more arrived and bags of mail began to pile up in the front hall. Soon the parlor and laboratory were filled with foreign visitors and their comfortable life began to unravel.

  One morning as Madame and Lucia were walking to the railway station a small woman with a pert green umbrella stopped them at the park’s entrance. She made no apologies. She just stood there gazing into Madame’s face with interest. “Aren’t you that lady scientist I read about in the papers?”

  “No,” Madame Curie said, politely, exchanging a look with Lucia. “I’ve never heard of her.”

  Madame Curie was not much interested in spiritualism. She went to the séances now and then, but never often and never with much enthusiasm. Lucia was glad for this, because it always worried her when Monsieur went off to speak with the spirits. She never rested on those nights, not until he was safely back home and she heard him shuffling through the kitchen on his nightly rambles.

  It came as no surprise that Madame Curie declined to go to the séance that evening in late November. She said she had work to do and that she wanted a think and that Monsieur should go on without her. She said she might go another time, but that she couldn’t make any promises.

  Monsieur Curie was not pleased with this development. Especially since it came at the last minute, suddenly, without warning, a jarring reminder that the world could be chaotic and unpredictable, a condition he found hard to accept. “They want a woman there, Marie,” he complained. “They made that abundantly clear. And I already told them you were coming. You said you were coming.”

  “I am tired. I want to stay home and get my work done. Take Lulu.”

  Lucia looked up from the chessboard.

  “You’ll go, won’t you, Lulu?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose,” she said with great difficulty. She could not imagine going to one of those things. Babusia had always warned her to stay away from the spirits. To invite them in wasn’t natural, and moreover it was dangerous. The living weren’t meant to visit with the dead. It was against God’s will. And who knew what mischief could be stirred up by it?

  Monsieur shut his notebook and regarded his wife with a look of distress. “But they want you, Marie. They specifically asked for you.”

  “I’m afraid they would be very disappointed with me, madame,” Lucia added quickly. “They asked for Madame Curie.”

  Madame Curie remained unmoved an
d continued to look over her notes. “Well, they will have you instead, Lulu. I’m sure you will suit them. You are a very clever girl. And besides, you will enjoy yourself. Professor Richet invites only the best mediums to his séances.”

  A spark at the mention of Richet. “Does he have a brother, this Professor Richet?”

  “Yes, of course. That journalist. The one who wrote the article.”

  The séance started late that night, so it was nearly half past nine by the time they boarded the omnibus. Lucia placed a hand under Monsieur’s arm to help him up the steps. Of course, he said he didn’t need assistance, but she ignored him, as she always did, and gave him a lift up. He didn’t like being helped, because it drew attention to his infirmity.

  It was fortunate that his attention was on the steps and not on the side of the omnibus where he would have seen an advertisement for La Crème Activa, a beauty cream containing radium that guaranteed a more youthful appearance. If he had seen it, he would have said something, most likely a prickly comment too loud for the omnibus. Monsieur couldn’t help but say exactly what was on his mind. He practiced no artifice. For that she grew to respect him, and certainly she wanted to protect him. He seemed too tender for the world, like the inside of a mouth or some delicate creature from beneath the sea.

  The yellow line took them up to the rue de Médicis, where they had to walk a few blocks to the flat. All the way along she thought about the dark room and the spirits that would appear in it and the terrible unknown that waited for them. As she followed Monsieur Curie up the steps she realized that she had forgotten her Saint Christopher’s medal. Now she had no protection.

  The parlor proved to be a welcome distraction. It had been a long time since she had been in such a room, not since that summer at the Babineauxes’ when they were on vacation. It was designed to give the visitor the impression of a secret glade. The fringed sofas were covered in green velvet. The drapery was also velvet in a deeper shade of green. Great Chinese jars full of chrysanthemums, white peacock feathers spilling out of a vase shaped like a mushroom, and cloche bell jars displaying fairyland scenes of miniature fern forests completed the effect.