The Other Einstein(72)
“Well”—I gestured to my face—“I am as well as can be expected. I appreciate the visit,” I said with a curtsy. The women returned the gesture, and we said our farewells.
The pot roast simmered in the oven, sending a warm, comforting smell throughout the apartment. The boys were playing on the floor of the living room, building a fortress together, Hans Albert in the lead and Tete as his assistant. Books I’d just read aloud to them were piled up on the floor next to the sofa. The scene in our apartment conveyed contentment to the observer, yet anything but serenity brewed beneath the surface.
Albert arrived home with a slam of the door. He greeted the boys first, tickling them and asking about their day. I heard him whisper, “How’s Mama today?” but I didn’t want to eavesdrop, so I turned my attention to setting the dining room table.
Once I finished, I reentered the kitchen and nearly bumped into a waiting Albert. Dark circles under his eyes cast shadows on his face, and he held a bouquet of alpenrose and bird’s-eye primrose—alpine flowers carted in from the valleys—in his hands. He’d never given me flowers before, except on our wedding day.
“I’m sorry, Dollie.” He gestured to my face and handed me the bouquet.
Without a word, I took them from him and began searching for a vase. My action wasn’t an acceptance of his apology but a nod to the beautiful fragility of the flowers themselves.
He followed me. “I feel terrible about your face. And about Elsa.”
Silently, I busied myself with cutting the bottoms off the flowers’ stems and arranging them in the blue-and-white porcelain vase. The vase had been a gift from a scientific admirer, Albert once told me. Now I wondered who really had given it to him. How many other lies had he told me? How many other women were there? Was there any scrap of my life that remained true?
“I broke it off with Elsa only a few weeks after it began last Easter, Mileva. I swear to you. Even Elsa’s letter refers to our separation.”
I nodded but didn’t answer as I continued preparing our evening meal. Slicing bread, spooning out the pot roast onto plates, quartering beets to accompany the meal. Wasn’t this the last remaining service Albert wanted from me? I might as well be any housekeeper for hire. There wasn’t anything else left of value in me, he’d have me believe. He had hollowed me out.
“Mileva, please say something.”
What did he expect me to say? That I forgave him? I didn’t. Not for hitting me, intentional or not. Not for Elsa. Not for Marcel. Not for Lieserl, most of all. And certainly not for promising me a marriage full of scientific partnership and breaking that promise right in front of my now-battered face.
“Mileva, I want to make things right between us. I’ve been invited to lecture on photochemistry and thermodynamics at the French Physics Society, and Marie Curie has invited us to stay in her home in Paris while we are there. I know you’ve wanted to meet her, and we’ve never been to Paris. Will you come with me?”
I stared at Albert’s face, but I wasn’t looking at him. Images of Paris and photographs of Marie Curie floated in my mind. I had long admired the famous scientist, the winner of the 1903 and 1911 Nobel Prizes, in physics and chemistry, respectively.
I didn’t know what to do, but I would agree to this trip. Only for my own purposes, however. Not for those of Albert.
Chapter 37
April 1, 1913
Paris, France
I’d always believed Zürich to be the epicenter of all things academic and sophisticated. Certainly compared to Novi Sad, Ka?, Prague, and even Bern, it was. Yet as I strolled through the glittering streets of Paris on Albert’s arm and at Madame Curie’s side on our way to dinner, along with her daughters and several male family members serving as chaperones, I understood that Zürich was provincial in comparison to the exquisite French capital.
After a languorous walk through the Bois de Vincennes, an enormous, fastidiously maintained park bordering the Seine, Albert asked why the park was largely empty. Madame Curie explained, “I’m told that the only fashionable time to promenade through the park is between three and five o’clock. It is past that hour. My apologies if you were hoping for a glimpse of the latest Paris fashions.”
“We have never cared about being fashionable, have we, Mileva? How about you, Madame Curie?”
A chortle escaped unexpectedly from the somber Madame Curie’s mouth. “Fashionable? Oh my, Albert, no one has ever accused me of being fashionable. Quite the opposite. And how many times have I asked you to call me Marie?”
While her laughter surprised me, her response did not. Fashion was, quite obviously, the last thing on her mind. The frizzy, almost unkempt, grayness of Madame Curie’s hair and the textured black of her simple dress made her appear dour, a darkness that made me feel oddly comfortable. She looked familiarly Slavic, particularly in comparison to the Parisian trends.
We stepped onto one of the wide, elegant boulevards for which Paris was justifiably famous. As we strolled down a sidewalk bordered by tall, manicured trees, I felt the ground rumble under my feet. I looked over at Albert in alarm, but before I could ask the source of the vibrations, Madame Curie said, “That is the movement of our underground electric railway, called the Metropolitan Underground Railway or ‘Metro.’ It takes travelers from one end of the city to the other—and back again if they choose—in an eight-mile loop.”