Einstein: His Life and Universe

His son Peter Bucky happily spent time driving Einstein around, and he later wrote down some of his recollections in extensive notebooks. They provide a delightful picture of the mildly eccentric but deeply unaffected Einstein in his later years. Peter tells, for example, of driving in his convertible with Einstein when it suddenly started to rain. Einstein pulled off his hat and put it under his coat. When Peter looked quizzical, Einstein explained: “You see, my hair has withstood water many times before, but I don’t know how many times my hat can.”³²

Einstein relished the simplicity of life in Watch Hill. He puttered around its lanes and even shopped for groceries with Mrs. Bucky. Most of all, he loved sailing his seventeen-foot wooden boat Tinef, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk. He usually went out on his own, aimlessly and often carelessly. “Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,” remembered a member of the local yacht club who went to retrieve him on more than one occasion. “He apparently was just out there meditating.”

As he had at Caputh, Einstein would drift with the breeze and sometimes scribble equations in his notebook when becalmed. “Once we all waited with growing concern for his return from an afternoon sail,” Bucky recalls. “Finally, at 11 pm, we decided to send the Coast Guard out to search for him. The guardsmen found him in the Bay, not in the least concerned about his situation.”

At one point a friend gave him an expensive outboard motor for emergency use. Einstein declined. He had a childlike delight about taking small risks—he still never took a life jacket even though he could not swim—and escaping to where he could be by himself. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” said Bucky. “To Einstein, this could simply have provided more time to think.”³³

The sailing rescue sagas continued the following summer, when the Einsteins began renting in Old Lyme, Connecticut, also on Long Island Sound. One such tale even made the New York Times. “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein,” read the headline. The young boys who saved him were invited to the house for raspberry juice.³⁴

Elsa loved the Old Lyme house, although both she and her family found it a bit too imposing. It was set on twenty acres, with a tennis court and swimming pool, and the dining room was so large that they initially were afraid to use it. “Everything is so luxurious here that the first ten days—I swear to you—we ate in the pantry,” Elsa wrote a friend. “The dining room was too magnificent for us.”³⁵

When the summers were over, the Einsteins would visit the Bucky family at their Manhattan home once or twice a month. Einstein would also stay, especially when he was by himself, at the home of the widower Leon Watters, the pharmaceutical company owner he had met in Pasadena. He once surprised Watters by arriving without a dressing gown or pajamas. “When I retire, I sleep as nature made me,” he said. Watters recalled that he did, however, ask to borrow a pencil and notepad for his bedside.

Out of both politeness and his touch of vanity, Einstein found it hard to decline requests from artists and photographers who wanted him to pose. One weekend in April 1935, when he was staying with Watters, Einstein sat for two artists in one day. His first session was with the wife of Rabbi Stephen Wise, not known for her artistic ability. Why was he doing it? “Because she’s a nice woman,” he answered.

Later that day, Watters picked Einstein up to ferry him to Greenwich Village for a session with the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov, a practitioner of Soviet realism, who was producing what would be a distinguished bust of Einstein that is now at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein had been introduced to Konenkov through Margot, who was also a sculptor. Soon, all of them became friends with his wife, Margarita Konenkova, who, unbeknown to Einstein, was a Soviet spy. In fact, Einstein would later become, after Elsa’s death, romantically involved with her, which would end up creating, as we shall see, more complexities than he ever knew.³⁶

Now that they had decided to stay in the United States, it made sense for Einstein to seek citizenship. When Einstein visited the White House, President Roosevelt had suggested that he should accept the offer of some congressmen to have a special bill passed on his behalf, but Einstein instead decided to go through the normal procedures. That meant leaving the country, so that he—and Elsa, Margot, and Helen Dukas—could come in not as visitors but as people seeking citizenship.

So in May 1935 they all sailed on the Queen Mary to Bermuda for a few days to satisfy these formalities. The royal governor was there to greet them when they arrived in Hamilton, and he recommended the island’s two best hotels. Einstein found them stuffy and pretentious. As they walked through town, he saw a modest guest cottage, and that is where they ended up.

Einstein declined all official invitations from the Bermuda gentry and socialized instead with a German cook he met at a restaurant, who invited him to come sailing on his little boat. They were away for seven hours, and Elsa feared that Nazi agents may have nabbed her husband. But she found him at the cook’s home, where he had gone to enjoy a dinner of German dishes.³⁷

That summer, a house down the block from the one they were renting in Princeton went on sale. A modest white clapboard structure that peeked through a little front yard onto one of the town’s pleasant tree-lined arteries, 112 Mercer Street was destined to become a world-famous landmark not because of its grandeur but because it so perfectly suited and symbolized the man who lived there. Like the public persona that he adopted in later life, the house was unassuming, sweet, charming, and unpretentious. It sat there right on a main street, highly visible yet slightly cloaked behind a veranda.

Its modest living room was a bit overwhelmed by Elsa’s heavy German furniture, which had somehow caught up with them after all their wanderings. Helen Dukas commandeered the small library on the first floor as a workroom in which she dealt with Einstein’s correspondence and took charge of the only telephone in the house (Princeton 1606 was the unlisted number).

Elsa oversaw the construction of a second-floor office for Einstein. They removed part of the back wall and installed a picture window that looked out on the long and lush backyard garden. Bookcases on both sides went up to the ceiling. A large wooden table, cluttered with papers and pipes and pencils, sat in the center with a view out of the window, and there was an easy chair where Einstein would sit for hours scribbling on a pad of paper in his lap.

The usual pictures of Faraday and Maxwell were tacked on the walls. There was also, of course, one of Newton, although after a while it fell off its hook. To that mix was added a fourth: Mahatma Gandhi, Einstein’s new hero now that his passions were as much political as they were scientific. As a small joke, the only award displayed was a framed certificate of Einstein’s membership in the Bern Scientific Society.

Besides his menagerie of women, the household was joined, over the years, by various pets. There was a parrot named Bibo, who required an unjustifiable amount of medical care; a cat named Tiger; and a white terrier named Chico that had belonged to the Bucky family. Chico was an occasional problem. “The dog is very smart,” Einstein explained. “He feels sorry for me because I receive so much mail. That’s why he tries to bite the mailman.”³⁸

“The professor does not drive,” Elsa often said. “It’s too complicated for him.” Instead, he loved to walk, or, more precisely, shuffle, up Mercer Street each morning to his office at the Institute. People often snapped their heads when he passed, but the sight of him walking lost in thought was soon one of the well-known attractions of