one ever asked her husband or any other man how, as a husband and father, he managed to find time for a career.
She tried to forget those brief unpleasant moments and simply enjoy her success. That evening, Clara threw her a combination farewell party and celebratory reception, crowding into her apartment about four dozen old acquaintances Mildred had not seen in years and who had come into the city especially to see her. Several had attended her lecture, and most congratulated her warmly, but one former colleague from her brief stint at Goucher College peered at her over the rim of his glass, took a deep drink, and remarked, “You were awfully friendly with that bunch from the Bund.”
“The Bund?” Mildred echoed.
“The German American Bund. Surely you didn’t miss the uniforms. That fellow in the jackboots and the girls in the black-and-white getups and blond braids.” He took another drink, regarding her quizzically as if he was not sure whether her confusion was genuine. “The Bund is an American pro-Nazi organization, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. They number in the thousands across the country, holding pro-Hitler rallies, waving their swastika flags, putting their little boys in summer camps like the Hitler Youth. It’s all rather disgusting.”
“I couldn’t agree more.” Mildred pressed a hand to her stomach, suddenly nauseous. Had she said anything that could put her friends or Arvid’s family in danger should those Bund people report it to the Gestapo? “I wonder why they came to my lecture.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” he said flatly, draining his whiskey sour in one last gulp and moving off into the crowd.
After that, Mildred guarded her words, plagued by thoughts of storm troopers apprehending Greta as she strolled with Ule in the Tiergarten, or hauling Arvid’s brother Falk out of a classroom in Munich, or dragging his mother away from her easel at her home in Jena. What might they do to the people she loved in retaliation for anything offensive she said or did? What might they do to her and Arvid the moment they disembarked from their ship at Hamburg?
More than once, as the evening passed, she caught herself glancing over her shoulder in midsentence and turning back to find the person she was conversing with watching her, bemused. These were old friends, she admonished herself. None of them corresponded with Nazis. And yet she could not shake off her cautious reserve. Any hope she might have had that no one noticed was dispelled when, just as she was about to enter the kitchen, she overheard someone within telling a companion that she feared Mildred had “gone Nazi.” Rather than enter the room and calmly reassure them that she had not, she silently withdrew.
It was with heartbreaking relief the next morning that she packed her bags, tucked Martha’s book carefully in with her academic papers, thanked Clara for her hospitality, and departed for Penn Station. She caught the midmorning train to Philadelphia and from there traveled on northwest of the city, where later that evening she spoke at Haverford College. There the reception to her lecture was even more enthusiastic than in New York. “You discussed these contemporary trends in European literature with a charm, power, and vividness that I have rarely seen equaled,” declared one philosophy professor when he and several other faculty members joined her onstage afterward as the audience filed from the auditorium. “You have almost restored my ebbing faith in the function of the interpretive lecture.”
Mildred could hardly have asked for higher praise than that, but her glow of gratitude diminished when she glimpsed members of the German American Bund congregating in one of the aisles, watching her expectantly, no doubt hoping to speak with her on her way out. Fortunately, her hosts instead led her backstage and out a side door to a cab, which quickly whisked her off to the charming inn where they had arranged for her to spend the night.
A similar scene played out at the University of Chicago, except that four men in derivative Brownshirt uniforms approached her podium before her host could escort her away. They asked, politely and in very good German, if she and her chaperone would do them the honor of joining them for dinner. Before Mildred could respond, the event host, a silver-haired professor of Germanic languages, answered in flawless German that Frau Harnack must offer her regrets due to a prior engagement for which she was already five minutes late. “You didn’t