This beach house story is a tale told by an eleven year-old girl, Natalie Scragg, who lived with her parents and younger sister Nadine at 2467 South Ocean Avenue in Hagers Head, New Jersey. The American Automobile Association posts that Albert Einstein spent his summers at that address. Even though at the outset, the first sentence indicates (with no authority) that Einstein spent his summers at 2647 South Ocean Avenue. Appel's opening paragraph is a succinct setting for the entire story as seen through the eyes of the older daughter. Natalie speculates as to whether this statement by AAA was a typographical error, or that maybe the editors had some basis to think it was the correct address.
Right away, we learn through Natalie that her parents, Bryce and Delia, are mismatched. Her father is a dreamer, and her mother is an unrepentant realist. When strangers appear asking for a tour of Einstein's summer cottage, the mother angrily tells them to get lost, but Bryce sees it as a cash cow to alleviate their dismal financial circumstances. As the consummate dreamer, he had been laid off work at Bell Labs working on a translation device to understand cats and dogs that had no traction with his employers.
Bryce devises a plan to hold tours of Einstein's Beach House for twenty-five dollars a head. Delia will have no part of it, and spends her time fuming at what she regards as Bryce's ineptness and fuzzy thinking.
The Scraggs believed the house had been in the family as a summer home, and then the crash of 1929, forced Bryce's grandfather to give up his townhouse in Washington Square Village and move to the beach house as a permanent residence. It had been in the family for years.
Bryce bumbles along with the tours, inventing stories about Einstein and enjoying revenue growing to the amount of $2200 a week. It was enough to warm the cold heart of Delia, causing her to admit that the money had made it possible to pay their taxes on time for the first time in their life. Natalie sees her parents kiss "passionately" and remembers this as their happiest moment.
Of course, paradise unravels when Einstein's niece from Germany, Dora Winterer, visits them at the Beach House to claim her inheritance from uncle Albert: the beach house that Bryce thought had been in his family for years. Checking his safe deposit box, he fails to find a deed to the property.
We last see the Scraggs with Bryce changing a flat tire as they are on the road, without a home, on their way to live with Aunt Claire in her Virginia row house.
Here is a story of a relative of Albert Einstein, evicting the relatives of the Scraggs from Einstein's Beach House, a house they believed had been in the Scraggs family for generations.
Maybe the real story is how did Grandpa Scraggs end up in the wrong house?
Appel writes a tight narrative, but there are a lot of loose ends. What is convincing is his sharp delineation of many characters that appear in the story: family members, boarders renting the lower floor, many visitors to the museum, and finally the dagger in the heart: Einstein's niece, Dora Winterer, sporting her memory of visiting uncle Albert in that very home and clutching the official deed to the property.
Whatever. This story has lots of relatives. Clearly adhering to a theory of relativity.
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