the town.
On his walk back home at midday, he would often be joined by three or four professors or students. Einstein would usually walk calmly and quietly, as if in a reverie, while they pranced around him, waved their arms, and tried to make their points. When they got to the house, the others would peel off, but Einstein sometimes just stood there thinking. Every now and then, unwittingly, he even started drifting back to the Institute. Dukas, always watching from her window, would come outside, take his arm, and lead him inside for his macaroni lunch. Then he would nap, dictate some answers to his mail, and pad up to his study for another hour or two of rumination about potential unified field theories.39
Occasionally, he would take rambling walks on his own, which could be dicey. One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell anybody,” he said, “but I
This incident was recounted by the son of the dean, but like many of the tales about Einstein’s distracted behavior it may have been exaggerated. The absentminded professor image fit him so nicely and naturally that it became reinforcing. It was a role that Einstein was happy to play in public and that his neighbors relished recounting. And like most assumed roles, there was a core of truth to it.
At one dinner where Einstein was being honored, for example, he got so distracted that he pulled out his notepad and began scribbling equations. When he was introduced, the crowd burst into a standing ovation, but he was still lost in thought. Dukas caught his attention and told him to get up. He did, but noticing the crowd standing and applauding, he assumed it was for someone else and heartily joined in. Dukas had to come over and inform him that the ovation was for him.41
In addition to the tales of the dreamy Einstein, another common theme was that of the kindly Einstein helping a child, usually a little girl, with her homework. The most famous of these involved an 8-year-old neighbor on Mercer Street, Adelaide Delong, who rang his bell and asked for help with a math problem. She carried a plate of homemade fudge as a bribe. “Come in,” he said. “I’m sure we can solve it.” He helped explain the math to her, but made her do her own homework. In return for the fudge, he gave her a cookie.
After that the girl kept reappearing. When her parents found out, they apologized profusely. Einstein waved them off. “That’s quite unnecessary,” he said. “I’m learning just as much from your child as she is learning from me.” He loved to tell, with a twinkle in his eye, the tale of her visits. “She was a very naughty girl,” he would laugh. “Do you know she tried to bribe me with candy?”
A friend of Adelaide’s recalled going with her and another girl on one of these visits to Mercer Street. When they got up to his study, Einstein offered them lunch, and they accepted. “So he moved a whole bunch of papers from the table, opened four cans of beans with a can opener, and heated them on a Sterno stove one by one, stuck a spoon in each and that was our lunch,” she recalled. “He didn’t give us anything to drink.”42
Later, Einstein famously told another girl who complained about her problems with math, “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are even greater.” But lest it be thought he helped only girls, he hosted a group of senior boys from the Princeton Country Day School who were baffled by a problem on their math final exam.43
He also helped a 15-year-old boy at Princeton High School, Henry Rosso, who was doing poorly in a journalism course. His teacher had offered an A to anyone who scored an interview with Einstein, so Rosso showed up at Mercer Street but was rebuffed at the door. As he was slinking away, the milkman gave him a tip: Einstein could be found walking a certain route every morning at 9:30. So Rosso snuck out of school one day, positioned himself accordingly, and was able to accost Einstein as he wandered by.
Rosso was so flummoxed that he did not know what to ask, which may have been why he was doing poorly in the course. Einstein took pity on him and suggested questions. No personal topics, he insisted. Ask about math instead. Rosso was smart enough to follow his advice. “I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out the mathematical structure of the nature itself,” Einstein explained of his own education at age 15. “It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life.”
The interview earned Rosso an A. But it also caused him a bit of dismay. He had promised Einstein that it would only be used in the school paper, but without his permission it got picked up by the Trenton newspaper and then others around the world, which provided yet another lesson in journalism.44
Soon after they moved into 112 Mercer Street, Elsa became afflicted with a swollen eye. Tests in Manhattan showed that it was a symptom of heart and kidney problems, and she was ordered to remain immobile in bed.
Einstein sometimes read to her, but mostly he threw himself more intently into his studies. “Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles,” he had written to the mother of his first girlfriend. Then as now, he could escape the complexity of human emotions by delving into the mathematical elegance that could describe the cosmos. “My husband sticks fearsomely to his calculations,” Elsa wrote Watters. “I have never seen him so engrossed in his work.”45
Elsa painted a warmer picture of her husband when writing to her friend Antonina Vallentin.“He has been so upset by my illness,” she reported. “He wanders around like a lost soul. I never thought he loved me so much. And that comforts me.”
Elsa decided that they would be better off if they went away for the summer, as they usually did, and so they rented a cottage on Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. “I’m certain to get better there,” she said. “If my Ilse walked into my room now, I would recover at once.”46
It turned out to be an enjoyable summer, but by winter Elsa was again bedridden and getting weaker. She died on December 20, 1936.
Einstein was hit harder than he might have expected. In fact, he actually cried, as he had done when his mother died. “I had never seen him shed a tear,” Peter Bucky reported, “but he did then as he sighed, ‘Oh, I shall really miss her.’ ”47
Their relationship had not been a model romance. Before their marriage, Einstein’s letters to her were filled with sweet endearments, but those disappeared over the years. He could be prickly and demanding at times, seemingly inured to her emotional needs, and occasionally a flirt or more with other women.
Yet beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers. Elsa and Albert Einstein liked each other, understood each other, and perhaps most important (for she, too, was actually quite clever in her own way) were amused by each other. So even if it was not the stuff of poetry, the bond between them was a solid one. It was forged by satisfying each other’s desires and needs, it was genuine, and it worked in both directions.
