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the mailman.” 38<br />
“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<br />
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<br />
soon one of the well-known attractions of the town.<br />
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<br />
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<br />
would peel off, but Einstein sometimes just stood there thinking. Every now and then, unwittingly, he even started drifting back to the Institute.<br />
Dukas, always watching from her window, would come outside, take his arm, and lead him inside for his macaroni lunch. Then he would nap,<br />
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<br />
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<br />
particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not<br />
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 am Dr. Einstein, I’m<br />
on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.” 40<br />
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<br />
exaggerated. The absentminded professor image fit him so nicely and naturally that it became reinforcing. It was a role that Einstein was happy to<br />
play in public and that his neighbors relished recounting. And like most assumed roles, there was a core of truth to it.<br />
At one dinner where Einstein was being honored, for example, he got so distracted that he pulled out his notepad and began scribbling<br />
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<br />
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<br />
over and inform him that the ovation was for him. 41<br />
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<br />
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<br />
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<br />
to her, but made her do her own homework. In return for the fudge, he gave her a cookie.<br />
After that the girl kept reappearing. When her parents found out, they apologized profusely. Einstein waved them off. “That’s quite unnecessary,”<br />
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<br />
was a very naughty girl,” he would laugh. “Do you know she tried to bribe me with candy?”<br />
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<br />
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<br />
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<br />
Later, Einstein famously told another girl who complained about her problems with math, “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I<br />
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<br />
Day School who were baffled by a problem on their math final exam. 43<br />
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<br />
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<br />
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,<br />
positioned himself accordingly, and was able to accost Einstein as he wandered by.<br />
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<br />
him and suggested questions. No personal topics, he insisted. Ask about math instead. Rosso was smart enough to follow his advice. “I<br />
discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out the mathematical structure of the nature itself,” Einstein<br />
explained of his own education at age 15. “It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life.”<br />
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<br />
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<br />
journalism. 44<br />
Elsa’s Death<br />
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<br />
heart and kidney problems, and she was ordered to remain immobile in bed.<br />
Einstein sometimes read to her, but mostly he threw himself more intently into his studies. “Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s<br />
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<br />
first girlfriend. Then as now, he could escape the complexity of human emotions by delving into the mathematical elegance that could describe the<br />
cosmos. “My husband sticks fearsomely to his calculations,” Elsa wrote Watters. “I have never seen him so engrossed in his work.” 45<br />
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.<br />
“He wanders around like a lost soul. I never thought he loved me so much. And that comforts me.”<br />
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<br />
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<br />
It turned out to be an enjoyable summer, but by winter Elsa was again bedridden and getting weaker. She died on December 20, 1936.<br />
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<br />
a tear,” Peter Bucky reported, “but he did then as he sighed, ‘Oh, I shall really miss her.’ ” 47<br />
Their relationship had not been a model romance. Before their marriage, Einstein’s letters to her were filled with sweet endearments, but those<br />
disappeared over the years. He could be prickly and demanding at times, seemingly inured to her emotional needs, and occasionally a flirt or more<br />
with other women.<br />
Yet beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers. Elsa and Albert<br />
Einstein liked each other, understood each other, and perhaps most important (for she, too, was actually quite clever in her own way) were amused<br />
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<br />
needs, it was genuine, and it worked in both directions.