Jillian Cantor: Half Life

How beautiful she was up on stage, dressed in taffeta as blue as her eyes! And sitting in the audience, I was mesmerized by the way her fingers moved across the keys, fast and furious and delicate all at once. Somehow we had made her, Kaz and I. But she had worked hard and practiced and practiced. She had gone after her dream; she had made herself, too.

Kaz squeezed my hand, and when she finished performing and stood up to take her bow, he turned and kissed my cheek. “You’re crying, kochanie ,” he whispered to me, reaching up to wipe away my tears. “Don’t be sad.”

“I’m not sad,” I said back to him. “Watching her, now I know we have done everything right. Made all the right choices in our lives, haven’t we?”

“Yes, kochanie ,” he agreed with me. “We have.”

“TAKE A WALK WITH ME,” PIERRE SAID THE MORNING AFTER the concert. He’d come to Hela and Jacques’s house, where we were all staying for a few days for a visit, all of us laughing around the breakfast table this morning: Kaz and Klara, Hela and Marie and Jacques. Pierre whispered the request close enough to my ear, and no one else seemed to hear or notice him.

I stood. “I’ll be right back,” I said to Klara, who was sitting next to me. She smiled and dove back into conversation and laughter with her cousin, Marie.

“Come,” Pierre said. He held out his hand for me to take it, and I did, finding a comfort in his familiarity. He moved slower than he used to. His shoulders were a bit stooped, his hair gone, his beard thinned and pure white. “The delphinium are all in bloom in the Parc Monceau,” he said. “And I swear it, they are all the color of your mercury flame. Every time I’ve walked by them, I’ve thought, How Marya will love these flowers .”

I didn’t have a garden in Warsaw like I’d had in Krakow, and besides, I felt too old to tend to one now. It was harder to breathe than it once was, and as Pierre and I walked, I had to slow down. I began to cough.

“Marya?” Pierre stopped and turned to me. “Are you ill?”

“No, no,” I said. “Just a little cough, that’s all.” But inside my chest, my lungs constricted, pushing against my ribs, so that the words came out of me in a wheeze. Pierre’s face fell with concern. “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I will have Lou examine me when I get back to Warsaw, hmm? But I’m sure it’s nothing. Come, show me your delphinium.”

I DID NOT EXACTLY LIE TO PIERRE, BUT I DID NOT LET LOU examine me for six months after I returned to Warsaw. And maybe it was because deep down, I knew. I was a scientist and a teacher; I knew the body, my own body, well enough to understand it was failing me. But still, I could not push past my own denial, my own stupid hope that if I simply ignored it, it would go away. I would improve.

A little bit of the grippe coming back to haunt me, that is all , I reassured a worried Kaz for months and months as I coughed.

But by the winter my cough had become unbearable, my breathing more labored, and I could not ignore it any longer. I took the train out to Anin one Thursday when Kaz was teaching a class, wanting to go alone.

“Oh, ciotka ,” Lou said, examining my chest X-ray. Three months earlier, she had married a writer she’d cured of tuberculosis in their clinic, and up until this very moment, her face had been pink with joy.

“Just tell me the truth,” I told her. “Don’t soften it.”

She handed me the X-ray so I could examine it myself. The large black spots on my lungs confirmed what I already knew deep down. There was a cancer growing inside of me. And perhaps it was not at all surprising, after all the smoke that had filled my lungs day in and day out in the lab in Krakow.

And still, I felt shocked by it. That it was happening to me . My hands shook with disbelief. “Are you sure this is my X-ray, Lou?” I asked, handing it back to her. Perhaps it had fallen from the machine, belonging to someone else, another patient.

Lou put her arms around my shoulders, holding on to me. She stroked my hair with her hands. “It is too much to operate,” she said quietly after a few moments. “And we have no treatments for cancer other than surgery, you know.”

I nodded, I did know. There was nothing to be done for cancer, no curative therapy to treat it. “How much time do you think I have?” I asked her.

She didn’t say anything for another moment; she just held on to me. And then finally she said, “If you’re lucky and the cancer isn’t too aggressive… Maybe a year?”

Warsaw, 1932

There is a great big Radium Institute opening in Warsaw, entirely devoted to Curietherapy, using my radium for the curative treatment of cancer. I travel to Poland by myself for its grand opening at the end of May; neither of my daughters can make it.

Irène has recently given birth to a baby boy she named Pierre, a tribute to her father, and she and Fred are back in Paris looking after him, and my lab. I’ve had to admit I was wrong about Fred. Irène is right; he is kind and he is funny; he is a good scientist and now a good father, too. Everything my Pierre would’ve wanted for Irène. I have not lost Irène to Fred at all, but I have, instead, gained another scientist and a son-in-law. Irène is better than me; perhaps for her, love and science really can be one and the same.

I’ve spent most of the last years traveling, raising money for my institutes, giving speeches, and accepting honors, and it has been good to have Irène and Fred back in Paris. I’d much rather be in the lab with them, but who else will do these things, raise the money to keep my work going, if not me?

When she is not otherwise engaged with her piano performances, Ève accompanies me in my travels. She is nothing like me, or Irène—she is a dreamer, her head in the clouds, like her father. I am wont to remind her to pay attention every time she crosses the street. But it is silly, because she is the one looking out for me as I walk, as my eyes have failed me so. I wish she could’ve come to Warsaw with me, but she is busy, and she does not understand how important this particular journey is to me either. It is not just another speech, another honor—I have finally given something to my homeland.

Still, the train ride to Warsaw is very, very long, and very lonely to undertake by myself. I’m exhausted by the time I arrive, and it is hard to remember why I’ve been looking forward to this trip so. My entire body aches.

But then my sister-mother and my sister-twin are both waiting for me at the train station, and seeing them again, holding on to them again, I feel a glimmer of happiness.

THE CITY IS QUITE EXCITED TO RECEIVE ME, BESTOWING UPON me honorary degrees and so many kind words. It is a strange thing to reconcile this with the city I knew as a poor young girl, with the country who refused to hire me, to want me, to love me and Pierre, once. Now, I stand here in front of my new institute, hearing a crowd cheering, for me ? There is even a special brick in the building inscribed with an homage to me.

Hela and Bronia both attend the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and how wonderful it is to be here with both of them. They each hold on to one of my hands, and the three of us stand here and stare up at my great big beautiful institute, long after the ribbon has been cut and the crowd has dissipated.

“Look what you have done,” Hela says, softly, squeezing my hand. “Papa would be so proud.”

I have lost so much, so many people. I am old and ailing and often quite lonely. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like now if Pierre were still here. I think about that last sun-drenched morning in Saint-Rémy, when love and light and our little family all glowed there around me— luck , as Pierre called it.