The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWO

People were kind. Too kind.

Now that he was no longer Lieutenant Lucas Athan but merely a college professor again, all he wanted to do was to slip unnoticed into civilian life.

Even out of uniform, however, and wearing a rumpled brown corduroy suit and carrying a battered briefcase, he stood out from the crowd. How could he not? The black patch where his left eye had once been, the telltale scar along his forehead where a sliver of shrapnel had been embedded, made it plain he was a soldier who had done his patriotic duty, and been honorably discharged.

And everyone he met wanted to acknowledge his sacrifice.

At restaurants, people tried to pay his check for him. On buses, youngsters offered their seats. Once, in Central Park, a man in a homburg clasped his hands, and said that Lucas reminded him of his own son, lost on Omaha Beach, and that if he ever wanted to see a Broadway show, he should let him know. “Any show at all, you name it, and there’ll be two tickets waiting at the Will Call window.” The man tucked his business card into Lucas’s shirt pocket, and later, when Lucas finally looked at it, he saw that the man was the owner of a prominent theater chain.

He never took any of them up on their offers.

After the surgeries at New York Hospital, he spent the next couple of weeks in the city, living with his parents above the family’s diner, the Olympus, in Queens. It was a typical Greek diner, but his father, Stavros Athanasiadis, had built it from scratch. As so many immigrants did, his father had abbreviated the family name: “We’re American,” he’d often declared when Lucas was a boy, “and now we start over with a new American name.”

But Lucas hadn’t gone to all the trouble of getting his PhD so that he could live above the diner. He even had the distinct feeling that his father’s fondest wish, now that he was home and in almost one piece, was that he’d take over the place. And, truth be told, what could be better for business than a wounded soldier at the cash register?

Only it wasn’t going to be Lucas.

He was just beginning to wonder what his next move should be when, out of the blue, he received a letter from Princeton University saying that if he wished to resume his teaching duties at the beginning of the fall term, they would welcome him back. The university motto, as you know, is “In the Nation’s Service,” and the faculty and trustees are proud to acknowledge that service in every way afforded us. The dean helpfully mentioned that his old rooms were available in town.

It was like receiving an answer to his prayers.

At the little train station situated at the foot of campus, he disembarked from the train, loaded his bags into the trunk of the town cab, and returned to the Victorian boardinghouse on Mercer Street where he’d lived before being drafted. A black limousine, not the kind of thing normally seen in this quiet tree-lined neighborhood, idled at the curb across the street, but before he could give it any thought, Mrs. Caputo was scurrying across the front porch, wiping her hands on her apron, then rushing down the steps to embrace him. Tony Caputo was still serving somewhere in the Pacific, and Lucas knew that the hug, and the flood of tears, were meant as much for her absent husband as they were for him. Although she was only a few years older than Lucas, maybe thirty-three or thirty-four, she had always treated him like a mother, fretting over his late hours and bachelorhood. Once or twice, single women had shown up at the boardinghouse table, and Lucas had guessed they had been invited there to audition.

“Your rooms are ready,” she said, brushing at her eyes, “and I’m going to roast a whole chicken. Amy’s all of nine now, but she’ll be sure to tell you that when she gets home from school.”

They both laughed, and Mrs. Caputo helped carry his bags up the creaking wooden stairs to the top floor, where the door was already open. It was as if time had stood still, and all the horrors he had witnessed abroad had never happened. The single bed was made up in the corner, with the same patchwork quilt he remembered. The hot plate and radio were on the bookshelf, the desk in front of the dormer window. Outside, the leaves, just now starting to turn color, clung to the branches of the old oak tree. He could even hear the drip from the makeshift shower Tony Caputo had installed in the tiny bathroom under the eaves; to get his hair wet, Lucas had to stoop at a nearly impossible angle.

“I’ll let you get settled,” Mrs. Caputo said. “Dinner’s ready at five thirty. It’s good to have you back home,” she added, referring, as people did these days, not to any particular address, but to America.

“Hope Tony’s not far behind me.”

“I hope they all are.”

Once the door was closed, Lucas simply stood at the window, staring out at the trees and the scruffy yard, with its ramshackle swing set and cyclone fence. He’d stood at this very spot shortly before he’d left for basic training. Maybe time was an illusion after all, as some of the latest scientific theories seemed to suggest. Maybe he’d never left this room. Maybe he was whole again. But then he caught a glimpse of himself reflected in the glass, and the black patch brought him right back to reality.

After unpacking his bags, hanging his spare pants and jackets in the closet, and concealing the bottle of scotch in the bottom drawer of the dresser, he swallowed two aspirin and lay down on the bed. His shoulders ached from carrying his bags. His forehead hurt, too; the doctors had said the pain would dissipate over time, but it could still be pretty bad. They’d also told him he’d get used to the monocular vision, but he still found himself bumping into things on his blind side. Under the patch, he wore a glass eye, but people seemed perturbed by the fake eye, and were never sure where to look when they were talking to him. The patch made things simpler for everyone concerned.

Quite unannounced, sleep overcame him. The only sounds were comforting ones — the rustling of the leaves outside the window, the rattling of the pipes, the creaks and groans that any frame house, particularly one this old, was sure to emit — and together they acted as a powerful soporific. So, too, did the soft and familiar bed and the fading light of an early autumn day. When he awoke a couple of hours later, he wasn’t sure at first what had roused him. There was the smell of roasted chicken wafting up to him, the banging of the radiator, and a moment later, the thump of footsteps racing up the stairs. He had barely raised his head from the feather pillow when his door flew open and a girl in a red coat, squealing his first name, leapt onto the bed.

“Amy, I told you not to wake him!” Mrs. Caputo cried from the bottom of the stairs, but it was already too late for that. Amy squirmed like a puppy, hugging him with all her might.

“Oof,” he said, “you’ve got to take it easy. I’m an old man now.”

“You’re not old! But I am — I’m nine now!” she said, pulling back her head to look at him. “What happened to your eye?”

“I had a little accident over there.”

“What kind of accident?”

He could see that her mind was already running on two tracks — she wanted to know what had happened to him, but she was worried that the same thing might happen to her father, wherever he was.

“Something flew into my eye,” he said, “and now I get to wear this patch. Like a pirate.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not at all.” No need to tell her that the empty socket sometimes felt like a snowball buried in his head.

“Dinner’s ready,” Mrs. Caputo called up to them. “Get it while it’s hot.”

“Mom made your favorite dessert,” she confided. “Icebox cake.”

“She didn’t have to go to all that trouble,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed and searching for the shoes he’d kicked off.

“I told her she did. I like icebox cake.”

Always playing the angles. “Tell your mom I’ll be right down.”

“He’s coming!” Amy hollered, as she bounded out of the room. “And did I tell you, I won the spelling bee today!” she added for all to hear, as she clattered down the stairs.

Although dinner was just the three of them, Mrs. Caputo had made enough food for ten. How she did it, with ration coupons no less, was a miracle. She must have been saving up, Lucas thought, with a twinge of guilt. He wasn’t especially hungry, but he did his best to fake it.

This room, too, was exactly as he had remembered it, from the nicked-up wooden chairs, the plastic flowers in the centerpiece, and a faded picture of the Madonna del Granduca above the sideboard; it was a framed replica of the Raphael painting that hung in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.

Or did it? For all he knew, the Raphael, too, was stashed in a cave somewhere, awaiting the victory of the Third Reich.

Gesturing at the other guest chair, which used to be occupied by an aged spinster who had lived in the extra bedroom on the second floor, Lucas asked, “What became of Mrs. Hewitt?”

“The stairs got to be too much for her,” Mrs. Caputo said, nudging Amy to pass the mashed potatoes back his way. “She’s living with her sister in Passaic now. The building’s got an elevator.”

Lucas took a small dollop of the potatoes, and he saw Mrs. Caputo smile.

“Put some margarine on those,” she said. “You’re too skinny.”

“And you’re too good a cook.” He knew he had to leave room for the secret icebox cake. “Have you rented it out again?”

“Yes,” Amy piped up. “His name is Mr. Taylor. But he’s never here.” He could tell she didn’t like him.

“He’s not?” Lucas asked. “Where is he?”

Mrs. Caputo shrugged. “He says he’s got a job in Trenton. Something to do with the airplane plant.”

Civilians with jobs essential to the war effort often got deferments.

“But he’s quiet as a mouse and never causes any trouble,” she added. It seemed she didn’t like him much, either. “And the rent’s always on time.”

These days, everybody was struggling just to hold things together — financially and emotionally. Lucas knew that all Mrs. Caputo wanted was to have her Tony back, safe and sound, and to reclaim her house for just her own family. But making ends meet was the order of the day, and you did what you had to. A lot of people had it worse.

When Mrs. Caputo carried out the icebox cake, somehow he was able to express sufficient surprise, and enough appetite to have a big piece, though Amy complained that there wasn’t any whipped cream to put on top.

“You just can’t get that anymore,” Mrs. Caputo said. “Going to the grocery store is strictly hit or miss.”

Once the table was cleared, and Amy had gone upstairs to finish her homework, Lucas stepped out onto the porch and lit up a Camel. The limousine that had been parked across the street was gone, but the quaint, white two-story house, set back behind a neat front yard, was brightly lit, and through an open window, Lucas could hear the strains of a string quartet. For a second, he thought it was a phonograph, but then he stepped down the stairs to the sidewalk and realized that the music was actually being rehearsed in the front parlor. In a college town like Princeton, it wasn’t so unexpected. He heard laughter and the clinking of glasses. Someone scratched some deliberately grating notes on a cello. An elderly man’s voice, with a German accent, said something about starting again, and all in the same key this time.

More laughter. But the accent had been jarring.

He listened to the music — Mozart, if he wasn’t mistaken — and thought, despite himself, of the old mayor asking him not to harm the villagers hiding in the shaft. But he wasn’t the one who had planted the land mine that blew the child to kingdom come, left Toussaint with only one leg, and him with only one eye. When his cigarette was down to the filter, he stubbed it out on the sidewalk, and went back inside the boardinghouse. Mrs. Caputo was humming in the kitchen as she finished washing the dishes.

“Can I help you with those?”

“Oh, no,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m almost done.”

“So you’ve got a string quartet living across the street now?”

“Pardon?” she said, turning off the water and drying her hands on a dishrag.

“Across the street, I heard music. Are they musicians?”

“Oh, gosh, no,” she said. “That’s the professor. I guess he moved in after you’d joined up.”

“What professor?”

“Einstein.”

Lucas was nonplussed. Like everyone, he knew that Albert Einstein, fleeing from the Nazis, had emigrated from Berlin to Princeton in 1933 to take a professorship in theoretical physics. Lucas had even seen him on campus a few times. But he hadn’t been living across from the Caputos on Mercer Street back then.

“He’s a very sweet man,” she said. “He saw Amy carrying her violin case home from school, and they had a very nice chat about music.”

So that had been Einstein’s voice, merrily conducting the musicians. And that was why the long black limousine had been parked outside. Lucas wondered what dignitary or government official might have been paying the great man a visit.

“Sometimes, in the summer, I just sit on the front porch and listen. When Tony comes home,” she said, with a note of forced conviction in her voice, “he’s going to love it.”

“Yes, he will,” Lucas readily assented.

They both knew that they had just offered up an unspoken prayer.

“Good night then,” Lucas said, turning toward the stairs. “And thanks for the icebox cake.”

“Sleep as late as you want. It’s Labor Day weekend.”

In his room upstairs, the air was warm and close, and he threw the window open all the way. Leaning his head out, he could still hear the strains of the string quartet. Wait ’til he told his family, he thought. They’d been impressed enough when he first got the job at Princeton — what would they do when they found out that Einstein, one of the most celebrated people in the whole world, was his neighbor?