“Tell me what?”
“Adam and Arvid met by chance on the street not long ago when Arvid was on his way home from work. When Adam saw the Nazi emblem on Arvid’s buttonhole, he called him an unprincipled careerist and boxed his ears.”
“He did that?”
“Right there on the pavement, in plain sight of dozens of passersby. It was humiliating, but Arvid didn’t even try to defend himself.”
“I’m so sorry, Mildred,” said Greta, appalled. “I’ll talk to him. He should know better than to doubt Arvid’s integrity.”
“His family knows the truth, but I think they would have preferred for him to refuse the job and go off to England like his cousin Dietrich.” Mildred hesitated. “By now, I think—I hope—most of our true friends have convinced themselves that he joined only to conspire against the Nazis.”
“You shouldn’t tell them how right they are. You’d put them at risk.”
“But please do tell Adam. He must know he can trust Arvid, if we’re going to continue to work together.”
“I will.” Greta braced herself. “Mildred, there’s something else I need to tell you.”
As gently as she could, she explained that she was pregnant and that she and Adam were going to marry.
For a moment, Mildred looked pained, stricken, and her eyes filled with tears. A heartbeat later, she was smiling radiantly and embracing her. “I’m so happy for you,” she said. “You’ll be a wise and wonderful mother. What a lucky little child this will be!”
Greta’s heart went out to Mildred, who had longed for a baby for so many years and had borne disappointment so bravely, without ever succumbing to bitterness. Greta broke down in tears, overcome by the profound injustice of the world, that what Mildred desired with all her heart would be denied her, and yet had come to Greta unexpectedly and unsought, a disruption rather than a joy.
Soon more generosity of spirit came to Greta from an unexpected source. Gertrud did not contest the divorce, but wished Adam and Greta well and signed the papers as soon as they were delivered. Only then did they begin planning their wedding. It angered and offended them that they were required to obtain anAriernachweis, a certification of their Aryan purity, before they would be permitted to wed. Resenting the necessity, they nevertheless scrambled to collect proof of their ancestry from family members, church records, and government archives.
On August 28, Greta and Adam married in a civil ceremony surrounded by their family and dearest friends. The guests included Mildred and Arvid; Rudolf and Franziska Heberle, another couple Greta had first met in Wisconsin; several of Greta’s childhood friends and university classmates; Adam’s son Armin-Gerd, accompanied by Marie and Gertrud; dozens of luminaries from the German theater, close friends of the groom; and a few members of their resistance circle who did not fit into any of the other groups but were scattered among them, revealing as little about themselves as possible.
The two witnesses of the ceremony were Hans Hartenstein, a prominent official at the Ministry of Economics whom Greta had known since her school days, and Adam’s good friend Adolfe Grimme, the former Prussian minister of culture. Greta had to suppress her laughter at the reaction of the officious registrar, a stout little fellow who went wide-eyed and tongue-tied when he recognized the two very distinguished men who stood before him.
“He’s duly impressed,” Greta murmured to Adam, concealing her smile behind her bouquet.
“Apparently no one told him that they were both sacked for refusing to join the Nazi Party,” he replied.
“Hans wasn’t sacked. He resigned.”
“Fair point.”
Then they could say no more, because the registrar, in accordance with protocol, ordered the two witnesses to attention, snapping out the one-armed salute and a shrill “Heil Hitler!” The two men regarded him mildly and did not return the perfunctory greeting, nor did anyone else in the company. Flustered, cheeks scarlet, the registrar stammered and sweated his way through the rest of the ceremony, clearly at a loss for what else to do. It was too important and happy an occasion to spoil with irritation or annoyance, so by unspoken agreement the wedding party decided to regard the registrar with amusement instead.
They soon forgot him as they strolled a block down the street to their reception, where Greta danced and ate and laughed and accepted warm wishes and congratulations from new friends and old, all the people she loved best in the world. It was a wonderful day in a bleak season, when the promise of love lit up the world in a golden glow and the air tasted as sweet as wine.
Chapter Thirty-nine
October–December 1937
Martha
On October 29, Bill drove Martha and their mother in their reliable old Chevrolet to the Lehrter Bahnhof to meet their father’s train from Hamburg, where his ship from New York had docked earlier that morning. His lengthy absence had been hardest on his wife. As Martha watched her mother clutch her purse in her lap, her lips pressed together anxiously as she gazed out the window, she wished once more that her mother could have accompanied her father to the United States. She needed a respite from Berlin almost as much as Martha’s father had.
The previous year had been the most arduous, stressful, and frustrating of Ambassador Dodd’s life. He had watched, powerless to intervene, as German troops marched into the Rhineland in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles. He had observed Hitler mock the Olympic ideals at the Berlin Games, the Führer’s assurances of peaceful intentions in sharp contrast to Germany’s growing military might. As before, her father had shunned the annual Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, noting with horror and disgust that the German people increasingly revered Hitler as a god. Women wept tears of joy when his motorcade passed. Men dug up the soil he had walked upon and preserved vials of it as sacred relics. Young boys in crisp brown uniforms marched, trained, and sang songs glorifying blood spilled on the battlefield in defense of the Fatherland. To a young American woman raised on democracy and rational thought, it was repulsive and disturbing, but Martha found it impossible to tear her gaze away.
One day soon after the 1936 rally, Martha went looking for her father only to find his study empty, a draft of a letter marked “Personal and Confidential” on his desk. Naturally she stole a glance.
“With armies increasing in size and efficiency every day; with thousands of airplanes ready on a moment’s notice to drop bombs and spread poison gas over great cities; and with all other countries, little and great, arming as never before, one cannot feel safe anywhere,” her father had written to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. “What mistakes and blunders have been made since 1917, and especially during the past twelve months—and democratic peoples do nothing, impose no economic or moral penalties, to halt the process!”
Martha stopped reading there, deeply troubled by her father’s grim, foreboding assessment. After that, his frequent wistful reminiscences about Chicago and Stoneleigh took on a new significance. A month later, as they wandered through the garden of Tiergartenstrasse 27a admiring the changing autumn hues, her father confided that he was suffering from severe headaches and digestive troubles, which his physician attributed to stress. “You mustn’t mention this to anyone, but I don’t see how I can continue in this atmosphere longer than next spring,” he said, oblivious to her rising fear at the thought of her indomitable father brought down by the pressure of impossible demands. “I can’t render my country any useful service with my hands tied with red tape, and the stress of always doing nothing is too much to bear.”
Martha kept his confidence, divulging nothing to anyone, not even Bill or her mother, and certainly not Boris. She had no doubt that the letters she sent him at his new post in Poland were opened by Nazi censors before they crossed the border. Even on the few occasions when, to her parents’ consternation, she slipped away to Warsaw to meet him, she limited their conversations to the local nightlife, gossip about mutual acquaintances in Berlin, sex, and—although he had begun to show an infuriating lack of enthusiasm for the subject—marriage. Not that Boris needed her to tell him anything about conflict within the American embassy. Boris still had contacts in Berlin, and he probably knew more about the challenges her father faced than she did.
