look like you wanted to go with them,” she said in an undertone after the men walked away disappointed. “I certainly didn’t, and it would have been inappropriate for you to go alone.”
“Thank you,” Mildred murmured back. “I’d much rather have dinner with you, if you’re free.”
Mildred suggested a restaurant she had visited years before, but the professor insisted upon treating her to a home-cooked meal. Quite serendipitously, Mildred found herself sharing a delicious supper with the professor, her husband, and their eldest granddaughter, and spending the night in their redbrick town house on South Blackstone Avenue in Hyde Park, less than a block away from where the Dodds had lived when Mr. Dodd was on the university faculty.
By the time her tour brought her to Madison, she had learned to spot members of the Bund at a glance even when they were not clad in their full regalia, and to evade their pointed questions.
The lecture at the University of Wisconsin was the event she had most looked forward to, and it proved to be a wonderful homecoming. Many friends and former teachers and colleagues were in the audience, as well as her brother and his family. Her former mentor, William Ellery Leonard, also attended—but he provided the lone disappointing moment of the evening. He damned her with faint praise when a group of former classmates cheerfully asked for his review of her lecture, saying with a shrug that it was precisely what he had expected it to be. Mildred concealed her embarrassment with a smile, but she could not maintain the pretense later when he took her aside and told her that there were no faculty positions available for her in Madison. “You have many splendid achievements as wife, as Frau Professorin, and as an ambassador of American literature, since you’ve mastered a foreign language well enough to translate our nation’s great works for that wonderful culture,” he said, smiling indulgently with only the barest trace of regret. “But unfortunately, we don’t need this in Madison in these wretched days.’’
“I understand completely,” Mildred said, smiling, pleasant, professional. “I trust you’ll let me know if circumstances change.”
She was not surprised to hear that the UW English Department had no faculty positions available; none of the other universities on her tour were hiring either. What troubled her most was Leonard’s dismissive, condescending tone. She did not understand what she had done to disappoint him, but apparently her former mentor no longer believed in her. Perhaps it was the simple fact that she had never completed her doctorate. That, at least, she could put right. As soon as she returned to Berlin, she would resume work on her dissertation in earnest and not stop until she had earned her degree. Even if she could no longer count on Leonard for a letter of recommendation, she would have a much better chance of finding a university position with her doctorate in hand.
Although her job search had proven fruitless, and her encounters with the German American Bund unsettling, she did not regret her tour. Her lectures had been well received, and she had met several fascinating scholars with whom she hoped to keep in touch. She had reunited with old friends, which had been lovely, most of the time. After the Madison event, she spent several days at her brother Bob’s farm south of Madison, enjoying his company and that of her sister Marion, their spouses, and their children. Surrounded by loved ones on the beautiful, rich land thriving beneath the capricious midwestern skies, she felt truly at home for the first time since she had returned to America. But when she walked through the apple orchard where she and Arvid had married, she longed for him so intensely that tears came to her eyes.
Even more urgently than Martha had done, her brother and sister begged her not to return to Germany. They offered her and Arvid a place to stay until they found work and could get back on their feet.
“If we can’t earn a living, we can’t stay,” she said after explaining her futile job search. “Also, we have important work to do back home.”
Her siblings exchanged a look. “You called Germany home,” Marion said sadly.
“Wherever Arvid is, that’s home,” she replied, and when they glanced at their own spouses, she knew they understood.
The visit restored her spirits more than she could have imagined possible. In early August, as she traveled by train east to Washington where Arvid waited for her, she