One cold day later that winter, she slipped on the ice on the way to see Eduard and ended up lying unconscious until strangers found her. She knew she was going to die soon, and she had recurring nightmares about struggling through the snow, unable to reach Eduard. She was panicked about what would happen to him, and wrote heart- wrenching letters to Hans Albert.26
Einstein succeeded in selling her house by early 1948, but with her power of attorney she blocked the proceeds from being sent to him. He wrote to Hans Albert, giving him all the details and promising him that, whatever happened, he would take care of Eduard “even if it costs me all my savings.”27 That May, Mari had a stroke and lapsed into a trance in which she repeatedly muttered only “No, no!” until she died three months later. The money from the sale of her apartment, 85,000 Swiss francs, was found under her mattress.
Eduard lapsed into a daze and never spoke of his mother again. Carl Seelig, a friend of Einstein’s who lived nearby, visited him frequently and sent back regular reports to Einstein. Seelig hoped to get him to make contact with his son, but he never did. “There is something blocking me that I am unable to analyze fully,” Einstein told Seelig. “I believe I would be arousing painful feelings of various kinds in him if I made an appearance in whatever form.”28
Einstein’s own health began to decline in 1948 as well. For years he had been plagued by stomach ailments and anemia, and late that year, after an attack of sharp pains and vomiting, he checked into the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn. Exploratory surgery revealed an aneurysm in the abdominal aorta,* but doctors decided there was not much they could do about it. It was assumed, correctly, that it was likely to kill him one day, but in the meantime he could live on borrowed time and a healthy diet.29
To recuperate, he went on the longest trip he would make during his twenty-two years as a Princeton resident: down to Sarasota, Florida. For once, he successfully avoided publicity. “Einstein Elusive Sarasota Visitor,” the local paper lamented.
Helen Dukas accompanied him. After Elsa’s death, she had become even more of a loyal guardian, and she even shielded Einstein from letters written by Hans Albert’s daughter, Evelyn. Hans Albert suspected that Dukas may have had an affair with his father, and said so to others. “On many occasions, Hans Albert told me of his long- held suspicion,” family friend Peter Bucky later recalled. But others who knew Dukas found the suggestion to be implausible.30
By then, Einstein had become much friendlier with his son, now a respected engineering professor at Berkeley. “Whenever we met,” Hans Albert later recalled of his trips east to see his father, “we mutually reported on all the interesting developments in our field and in our work.” Einstein particularly loved learning about new inventions and solutions to puzzles. “Maybe both, inventions and puzzles, reminded him of the happy, carefree, and successful days at the patent office in Bern,” said Hans Albert.31
Einstein’s beloved sister, Maja, the closest intimate of his life, was also in declining health. She had come to Princeton when Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish laws, but her husband, Paul Winteler, from whom she had been drifting apart for many years,32 moved to Switzerland to be with his own sister and her husband, Michele Besso. They corresponded often, but never rejoined one another.
Maja began, as Elsa had, to look more like Einstein, with radiating silver hair and a devilish smile. The inflection of her voice and the slightly skeptical wry tone she used when asking questions were similar to his. Although she was a vegetarian, she loved hot dogs, so Einstein decreed that they were a vegetable, and that satisfied her.33
Maja had suffered a stroke and, by 1948, was confined to bed most of the time. Einstein doted on her as he did no other person. Every evening he read aloud to her. Sometimes the fare was heavy, such as the arguments of Ptolemy against Aristarchus’s opinion that the world rotates around the sun. “I could not help thinking of certain arguments of present-day physicists: learned and subtle, but without insight,” he wrote Solovine about that evening. Other times, the readings were lighter but perhaps just as revealing, such as the evenings he read from
When Maja died in June 1951, Einstein was grief-stricken. “I miss her more than can be imagined,” he wrote a friend. He sat on the back porch of his Mercer Street home for hours, pale and tense, staring into space. When his stepdaughter Margot came to console him, he pointed to the sky and said, as if reassuring himself, “Look into nature, and then you will understand it better.”35
Margot had likewise left her husband, who responded by writing, as he had long wanted to, an unauthorized biography of Einstein. She worshipped Einstein, and each year they grew closer. He found her presence charming. “When Margot speaks,” he said, “you see flowers growing.”36
His ability to engender and feel such affection belied his reputation for being emotionally distant. Both Maja and Margot preferred living with him to living with their own husbands as they got older. He had been a difficult husband and father because he did not take well to any constricting bonds, but he could also be intense and passionate, both with family and friends, when he found himself engaged rather than confined.
Einstein was human, and thus both good and flawed, and the greatest of his failings came in the realm of the personal. He had lifelong friends who were devoted to him, and he had family members who doted on him, but there were also those few—Mileva and Eduard foremost among them—whom he simply walled out when the relationship became too painful.
As for his colleagues, they saw his kindly side. He was gentle and generous with partners and subordinates, both those who agreed with him and those who didn’t. He had deep friendships lasting for decades. He was unfailingly benevolent to his assistants. His warmth, sometimes missing at home, radiated on the rest of humanity. So as he grew old, he was not only respected and revered by his colleagues, he was loved.
They honored him, with the blend of scientific and personal camaraderie he had enjoyed since his student days, at a seventieth birthday convocation upon his return from his Florida recuperation. Although the talks were supposed to focus on Einstein’s science, most dwelled on his sweetness and humanity. When he walked in, there was a hush, then thunderous applause. “Einstein just had no sense at all about what absolute reverence there was for him,” one of his assistants recalled.37
His closest friends at the Institute bought him a present, an advanced AM-FM radio and high-fidelity record player, which they installed in his home secretly when he was at work one day. Einstein was thrilled and used it not only for music but for news. In particular, he liked to catch Howard K. Smith’s commentaries.
He had pretty much given up the violin by then. It was too hard on his aging fingers. Instead, he focused on the piano, which he was not quite as good at playing. Once, after repeatedly stumbling on a passage, he turned to Margot and smiled. “Mozart wrote such nonsense here,” he said.38
He came to look even more like a prophet, with his hair getting longer, his eyes a bit sadder and more weary. His face grew more deeply etched yet somehow more delicate. It showed wisdom and wear but still a vitality. He was dreamy, as he was when a child, but also now serene.
