Marie Curie - Kathleen Krull [3]
Marie’s father, Wladyslaw Sklodowski, had trained for a career in science, but under Russian rule, Poles were forbidden to work in laboratories. Suspected of being a nationalist, he had to make do with unsteady work as a teacher of mathematics and physics.
Her mother, Bronislawa, was unusually well educated for a woman of her time. After graduating from Warsaw’s best private school for girls, she worked there ever after, eventually becoming the principal. A top-notch education for all five of her children was her highest priority. She even made it known that the better they did at school, the more she loved them.
The family belonged to a part of Polish aristocracy called szlachta—they had lost their land and wealth, but not their love of culture. Possessing material goods was not considered as worthwhile as sacrifice in the name of a cause. Bronislawa, with five growing children to support, didn’t consider herself above working with her hands. After buying the proper tools, she taught herself how to cobble so she could make her family’s shoes. To Marie she was “the soul of the house,” a true heroine.
As a baby crawling into her father’s study, Marie studied the barometer on the wall, an instrument that recorded air pressure and changes in weather. A few years later, she was fascinated with his locked glass cabinet of physics equipment—shiny glass tubes, scales, an electroscope, which was a device for detecting an electric charge.
Marie was only four the first time she read aloud. Her siblings reacted with shock, which made her burst into tears—she thought she had done something wrong. By hanging around them, she had taught herself to read. Soon she was helping them with their math homework.
Tragedy struck that same year. Bronislawa contracted tuberculosis, a lung disease for which no cure yet existed. The sound of her coughing could be heard all over the house. For fear of passing on the disease, she stopped kissing or cuddling the children. If Marie tried to embrace her, Bronislawa held up a hand to ward her off. She often had to go away for rest cures at sanatoriums in the mountains (fresh air and quiet were believed to help). Zosia, the oldest daughter, accompanied and nursed her mother from the time she was eleven.
When Marie was eight, Zosia was fatally stricken with typhus, another incurable disease. Her death dealt a harsh blow to the whole family, especially Bronislawa, who weakened.
Two years later, Marie wore her dead sister’s coat to her mother’s funeral.
Afterward she fell into the first of the profound depressions that descended upon her at various points throughout her life. Her way of coping was to shut down emotionally. She hardly spoke and buried herself in books, obsessing about a particular subject.
As times got harder for the family, Wladyslaw temporarily opened a school right in his own house, every corner of it filled with boys, some of whom boarded there. Marie slept in the living room, carving out precious time for homework after others went to bed. Then at six, she was up again to help prepare breakfast for twenty people at a time. Yet her sadness eventually lifted, perhaps as a result of forcing herself to keep so busy.
Education became an obsession. Marie thought of her father as her personal encyclopedia—he always had the answers. All of his lessons had the effect of making her aware of an invisible universe around her. Wladyslaw turned everything, even a walk in the woods, into a moral or educational lesson. Watching a sunset while hiking in the Carpathian Mountains meant