The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

“You look so pretty!” Amy exclaimed.

Simone stood before the floor-length mirror in the master bedroom while Mrs. Caputo checked one more time to make sure that the hem of her dress fully concealed the silk slip.

“How does it feel?” Mrs. Caputo said, standing back and studying Simone in the mirror. Instead of the traditional long white dress, she wore a summer dress, in cream chiffon, adorned with tiny pink and white lilacs, and a pair of matching satin shoes — leather was still hard to come by — in the latest peep-toe style.

“It feels wonderful,” Simone said, and Mrs. Caputo, who’d done some last-minute tailoring, beamed.

“We’re not done yet,” she said, and from the top of her bureau she retrieved a white cap with a lacy veil. After pinning it carefully atop Simone’s black hair, she ran a hand one last time over the scalloped sleeves of the dress, smoothing out any wrinkles. “I’ve never seen a more beautiful bride.”

Simone blushed — compliments had always unnerved her — but even she had to admit that she had never felt quite so cosseted. Her tawny complexion was perfectly offset by the creamy colors of the clothes, and she knew her dark eyes shone with the happiness and anticipation of the day. “What do I do now?” she said, glancing at the clock on the wall. “It’s still an hour before the ceremony.”

“Finish packing for your honeymoon.”

“It’s already done,” Simone said, gesturing at the battered tan suitcase behind the door. She and Lucas were going to spend over a week in Manhattan, a place she had always longed to explore.

“Well, then, just stand right there,” Mrs. Caputo said with a laugh. “No sitting, no stretching, no nothing. Pretend you’re a statue.”

“Is it okay if I pretend I’m a statue on the front porch?”

“Just stay in the shade,” Mrs. Caputo warned. “You don’t want to perspire.”

It was a hot and sunny day outside, but, as was usual for New Jersey at this time of year, muggy, too, and punctuated by the chirping of cicadas in the trees. Across Mercer Street, where the ceremony was to be held, she could see that the fence in front of Einstein’s house had been festooned with red roses — no doubt the flowers had been Helen’s idea — and she could hear the strains of a violin, tuning up, on the summer breeze.

It was all like a dream.

If someone had told her, a year ago, that she would be marrying an ex-GI professor, and in the backyard of Albert Einstein’s house in America, she would never have believed it. She could hardly believe it now, and yet, here she was, watching a yellow cab pull up across the street and drop off Lucas’s parents and sister. She had only met them two or three times — on trips to their apartment in Queens — but they had embraced her wholeheartedly. His mother, in particular, had warmed to the English and Egyptian girl who had now lost both of her own parents and found herself marooned in a foreign country.

Lucas got out last, and dutifully averting his eyes from the boardinghouse, ushered them all down the walkway and up the porch steps. He’d spent the night at the Nassau Inn with his family, so that he wouldn’t see the bride before the wedding. As the front door opened, Simone could hear Helen’s voice welcoming them. The word “lemonade” was carried on the wind. A fly buzzed around and around her head, and she felt her heart flutter as she brushed it away.

Ever since that terrible night at the inn, she had nursed an inordinate fear of flying insects.

The only one who could understand everything that had happened to her the previous fall was Lucas. He was her rock. He was the only one who would ever understand — who could ever understand — what had occurred. Who else would ever believe a word of it?

As for the ossuary… she had never laid eyes on it again after it had been flown off campus in the cargo hold of the helicopter.

The greatest discovery of her life — a discovery that would have made any archaeologist world-renowned — was now a secret that could just as well have remained in its tomb beneath the sands of the Sahara el Beyda. Given the toll it had already taken, however, she wasn’t sorry to see it go.

“Hello!” she heard from across the street, and she saw Adele Gödel, in a bright purple dress and gold hoop earrings, waving happily at her as she and Kurt strolled toward the professor’s house. Even on a day like this, Kurt had a muffler around his neck. “Du bist schoen!”Adele called out. “You look beautiful!”

Simone waved back, then turned as the screen door flew open and Amy, in her white pinafore with a pink sash, bounded out onto the porch.

“Slow down,” Mrs. Caputo warned. “Flower girls have to stay neat and tidy.” After looking over Simone one last time, she said, “Maybe we should go over.”

Simone found, to her own surprise, that her feet wouldn’t budge. She felt as if she were waiting, waiting for the one thing that would have made the day complete, but which she knew would never come. She longed to feel her father slipping his arm through hers and escorting her across the sun-dappled street and into the arms of the man she loved. Despite all the joy she felt, there was a hollow place in her heart that only he could have filled.

“What is it?” Mrs. Caputo asked.

“I wish my father could have been here.”

“I’m sure he would have been very happy that you’re marrying someone like Lucas.”

“I know. I’m very lucky indeed.” Squeezing her arm, Simone said, “Have you heard from Tony this week?”

“I had a letter yesterday, from some Pacific island that the censors blacked out the name of. But it said he was fine, and working on a ground crew.” She took a deep breath and stared into the middle distance. “The Germans have surrendered. Why can’t the Japanese?”

“They will,” Simone assured her. “I’m sure it will be soon.”

“It better be,” she said. “But no more talk about war. Today is all about peace and love and harmony.”

“To peace and love and harmony,” Simone said, as arm in arm they descended the porch steps and crossed the quiet street.

At the house, Helen ushered Simone into the front parlor, where Einstein’s flimsy music stand teetered beside the grand piano, while Mrs. Caputo went out in the backyard to make sure Amy wasn’t creating havoc. Simone was listening to the voices of the guests — only a dozen or so of their friends and colleagues, along with Lucas’s family — when Einstein himself shuffled into the room. He was wearing a rumpled seersucker suit, with a red carnation pinned askew to the lapel. On his feet, he wore moccasins with no socks, and his shaggy white hair was whipped into a froth like cotton candy.

To her, he looked as handsome as any movie star.

“It is an honor,” he said, taking both of her hands in his, “to give away such a beautiful bride.”

His skin was as soft as chamois, and his drooping dark eyes, under Olympian brows, were filled with affection and kindness.

“The honor is all mine, Professor.”

Helen poked her head in the door and said, “It’s time,” then whisked the sheer veil down over Simone’s eyes.

From the garden, she heard the opening strains of the wedding march, played by the string ensemble that often assembled in the front parlor. Einstein crooked out his arm, and she took it. The kitchen, which they had to pass through, was filled with platters of food under sheets of wax paper, and something was still baking in the oven. A timer was ticking. Helen held the screen door open as they carefully descended the back steps and then threaded their way down the aisle between the guests, all of them standing now beside the white wooden chairs that had been borrowed from the university. The Princeton president and his wife beamed from the back row.

Directly ahead, in front of the leafy green arbor which had been hastily erected to camouflage the garage, she saw Lucas, standing with his hands folded, in a suit as black as his eye patch. His younger brother, the best man, reached around to straighten his bow tie. Lucas didn’t even seem to notice — his gaze was fixed on her as Einstein escorted her into the presence of the university chaplain, who had been enlisted to perform the ceremony. A lace canopy had been erected to shield them from the hot sun.

When the minister intoned, “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?” Einstein cleared his throat and declared, “I do.” Disengaging his arm, he repeated, “I do,” then retreated to the seat Helen was patting.

The moment Lucas stepped beside her, she felt as if her shelter were complete. The canopy might ward off the sun, but it was having Lucas at her side that made her feel protected, fulfilled… loved. She glanced up at him, and though she saw that his tie was still askew, she resisted the urge to straighten it. There would be a lifetime to indulge such impulses.

The minister was extolling Holy Matrimony, “which is an honorable estate, instituted of God, signifying unto us the mystical union… ”

But she barely heard him; it was as if her ears were stuffed with cotton balls. As he continued — expatiating on the bonds of love, the responsibilities of marriage, the affection and understanding that a man and wife must always show one another — Simone remained in the warm embrace of this comforting cocoon, this sacred place where she felt engulfed by nothing but love. Feeling Lucas’s hand search out her own, she wove her fingers through his, only to glance down, beneath her veil, and see that his hands were nowhere near hers at all. They were still folded in front of him.

For a moment, she was puzzled, but, to her own surprise, completely unalarmed. The touch was a tender one, and on the vagrant breeze that stirred the canopy overhead, she’d have sworn that she smelled the familiar scent of her father’s sweet Turkish tobacco and sugary tea. Although she knew that anyone else would say that she was just imagining it, or that it was the aroma from the myriad flowers filling the garden, Simone knew better.

Her father was there, and he was giving his blessing to her marriage.

Tears welled in her eyes, and under her breath, she said, “I love you.”

Overhearing her, even as the minister prattled on, Lucas did take her hand in his, displacing the ghostly touch.

At the minister’s request, Amy skipped forward, holding a pink satin cushion to which the rings were affixed with safety pins. The best man detached them, while Amy swirled back and forth in excitement.

“With these rings,” the minister announced, “we seal the vows of marriage and represent the promise of eternal and everlasting love.” Turning to Lucas, he said, “Please repeat after me.”

Then she heard the time-honored words—“to have and to hold,” and “for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health”—and could scarcely believe it when she felt the ring being slipped onto her finger.

After the minister had repeated the vows to her, she took the second ring and placed it on the little finger of her groom; his fourth finger had been broken beyond repair. Looking up at him, she prayed that she would never forget the stray shaft of sunlight piercing the lace overhead, and the way that it threw his face into light and shadow, the silk fabric of his eye patch glistening, the black curls of his hair unfurling over his forehead, the sideburns a stark white ever since the lightning strike. There was a tiny nick on his cheek where he must have cut himself shaving that morning. She longed to kiss it.

“Those whom God hath joined together,” the minister declared, “let no man put asunder. By the power vested in me by the state of New Jersey, I now pronounce you husband and wife.” There was a short pause before he added, “You may now kiss the bride.”

Lucas lifted her veil, bent down, and gave her a quick and self-conscious peck on the lips.

Adele Gödel called out, “Ach—you can do better than that!”

And so he did, this time slipping an arm around her narrow waist and drawing her toward him. There was laughter and scattered applause, and she heard the string ensemble starting to play again for her walk up the aisle. They had no sooner joined hands and turned toward the guests — Einstein was clapping, with a big grin lifting his moustache — when several cars came careening down the alley, horns blaring, and screeched to a halt at the garage. A gang of interlopers, clutching pads and pens, piled out, some with cameras slung around their necks, and stampeded into the garden. All of them had press cards stuck in their fedoras, or clipped to the lapels of their sweat-stained suit jackets.

Her wedding? The press corps was going to crash her wedding?

Like a bunch of rowdy rugby players, they descended upon Einstein, elbowing the guests aside, knocking over a couple of chairs in their haste, and all of them clamoring about an atomic bomb and some place with an odd name that she’d never even heard of.

“We’ve dropped one on Hiroshima,” a reporter shouted out.

“What’s your reaction?” another one demanded, his pencil and notepad at the ready. “Did you know in advance?”

Flashbulbs popped as the professor, stunned, took a shaky step back. Helen instinctively moved to protect him.

“Without your discoveries, it couldn’t have been done,” the first one said. “How’s that feel?”

“Look this way!” a photographer hollered.

“No, over here, Professor!”

“What do you have to say?”

Einstein looked stricken.

“You think we’ve finally knocked the stuffing out of the Japs?”

“The Pentagon says we might have killed as many as a hundred seventy-five thousand of ’em, in one shot. That sound about right to you, Professor?”

Confusion reigned. The music stopped, the guests disassembled, a whole row of seats went over like dominoes as the reporters jockeyed for position closer to the beleaguered Einstein.

“When do you think they’ll surrender?”

Before her eyes, Simone saw the wedding collapse. Even the canopy, its stakes jostled by the crowd, became unfastened and blew away.

Lucas clutched her hand, and threw an arm around her shoulders.

Einstein, head down, his red carnation trampled underfoot by the pack of newsmen, was shepherded back into the house by Helen, who slammed the door firmly in the reporters’ faces… which didn’t keep them from running to the windows and trying to shout out their questions. A photographer climbed a tree in the backyard, hoping to get an angle into the house, but the branch broke and he thumped to the ground, groaning. No one paid him any attention. Someone else had turned up the radio of a car parked in the alley, and as she and Lucas stood there, equally ignored in all the commotion, she heard the voice of President Truman.

“The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. Today they have been repaid manyfold. And the end is not yet.”

Mrs. Caputo was kneeling on the grass, mouth open and clutching Amy, listening to the broadcast.

“It is an atomic bomb,” Truman continued. “It is a harnessing of the basic power of the universe.”

Simone saw the shades being yanked down in the kitchen windows.

“The force from which the sun draws its power has been loosed against those who brought war to the Far East.”

Loosed, Simone thought, like an evil genie, never to be contained again.

“God help us all,” Lucas said, his arm holding her tighter.

The curtains in the professor’s office upstairs were jerked shut, too, as if the whole house were being readied for a wake, not a wedding.

Which was suddenly how it felt to Simone.

The radio was playing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and from neighboring houses, she could hear shouts of exultation. Dogs were barking. Somebody cried, “Let ’em have it!” Surely, this would end the war — what nation could stand up against the power of the sun itself?

Mrs. Caputo, still on her knees, her arms wrapped around her daughter, was sobbing with joy.