American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (12 page)

But Lynne also found a sadder story from Ben’s time in Santa Fe. He had, while living with Abraham and Julia in 1879, fathered a child with a local Hispanic woman, Damasia Chavez. Lynne found a great-great-great-granddaughter of Ben’s illegitimate daughter, Josefita, who told us that Ben had wanted to take Josefita to Europe with him. In the end, however, he hadn’t, and he had gone off instead to found his own business in El Paso.

Lynne was convinced that Julia was devastated by this. “I would imagine that having Ben around Julia was a comfort to her,” Lynne wrote me. “One of the classic behaviors I imagine for Abraham was that he wanted to control everyone (especially who his children married). . . . He would NOT want his sons and daughters to think bastard children would be tolerated. Ben may have been banished from the Staab household . . .
maybe.”

Maybe.

I wasn’t sure that Abraham was quite the ogre that Lynne believed him to be, but the story made some sense. It is true that Ben didn’t marry Damasia, whatever the reasons. He moved to El Paso—in shame, perhaps?—the same year that the baby was born. Such things as an illegitimate child didn’t ruin a man, however, the way they did a woman. He still came to Santa Fe regularly—“Ben Schuster, of El Paso, hale, hearty, jovial and energetic, is in the city,” wrote the
New Mexican
after the baby’s birth. In 1883, he married a German Jewish woman, Sophia Berliner.

That was the year after Julia moved into her new mansion; the year before the archbishop’s nave was enclosed. The archbishop was in declining health, as he wrote in a letter to the bishop who would replace him. “Not only my memory, but also my other mental faculties have much declined,” he wrote; “the smallest serious effort, worries, cares, difficulties, exhaust me and make me ill.” Julia was pregnant then—perhaps with the ailing archbishop’s child, but more likely with Abraham’s.

In July of that year, eight years after her last successful pregnancy, she gave birth to a daughter. “Mr. Abraham Staab has a little heiress at his home,” the
New Mexican
reported on July 25. Julia was thirty-nine years old, and this was her final baby—the one who died and, according to the ghost stories, turned Julia’s hair white, the baby who might have been drowned in the bathtub and had so horrified the phone psychic Misha—the child of the darkness. They named her Henriette, after Julia’s mother.

Her life was woefully short. On August 9, 1883, the paper relayed the sad news. “Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Staab’s home was made glad only a few weeks ago by the coming of a new life and a new joy, a tiny girl babe. To-day He who gave it called it home to His ‘mansion in the skies not built with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ and sorrow reigns
instead of joy. The infant daughter was but three weeks old. Its death occurred at 8 o’clock this morning and at 8 o’clock this afternoon its white robed form was laid away in the Masonic cemetery amid the tears and regrets of the sorrowing parents and their large circle of friends.”

In the prayer book, Julia wrote a new entry: “
Henriette A. Staab geb am 22 Juli 1883, gestorben am 9th August 1883
.” The writing is smudged and uneven, slightly off-kilter, contrasting starkly with the thick black letters listing Henriette’s brother Teddy just above. It is written in pencil, as if Henriette’s spirit passed through too quickly to warrant a pen and pot of ink. In some traditions, it is considered a blessing when a child dies before it can commit any sins, for then it is guaranteed a spot in heaven.

And it was at this point, the ghost stories explain, that Julia came unraveled.

I
DROVE NORTH FORTY
-
FIVE
minutes from my home to visit a psychic named Sarina. She met me at the door of a squat one-story brick office building in the old square-built farming community where she lived. Sarina was in her forties and wore racing-striped sweatpants and a flowered T-shirt. Chaotic brown curls unfurled across her shoulders. After we introduced ourselves, she sat down in a low-slung gray tweed armchair against the wall. I chose a rocker across from her. I didn’t give her much information up front, only that I was looking for my great-great-grandmother, who was rumored to be a ghost.

Sarina looked into the middle ground off to her right. “I’m seeing her as older, in her sixties,” she said.

I explained that Julia had died at the age of fifty-two. “That’s interesting,” she told me. “She feels that she didn’t have the opportunity to complete things.”

The February sun angled through slatted shades onto Sarina’s face. She had come recommended by a friend, who had seen her many times and had great faith in Sarina’s ability. “I see her with this big hat,” she told me—a hat of the sort you’d wear in a play, or maybe to a play. “Did she appreciate or participate in the arts? She’s dressed up, really dressed up. OK—and flowers, there’s lots of flowers around her, I feel that she really loved flowers,” she said. “To your great-great-grandmother it feels like flowers were a big deal. And fragrances, I smell the fragrances of the flowers.”

Sarina smiled at the air off to her right. “She’s going back to her younger days,” she said. “The suitors were definitely plentiful. There were a lot of men who pursued her even though
she was married.” Perhaps the archbishop? Sarina couldn’t say. But she did say that at some point Julia’s “social butterflying” stopped, and her world contracted. A man made it so—it may have been Abraham. “She was asked to become more of a home person at that point.”

Not that Abraham held her back, Julia told Sarina—except Sarina was feeling that he did, in fact, hold her back. How odd, I thought, to watch Sarina take issue with the air. But Misha and Lynne had said the same: Abraham stymied Julia. “She doesn’t want to blame her husband, she wants to make that very clear, but she does want you to know there was this other part of her.”

Sarina stopped and listened for a time. Julia had thrust an image into her mind in the same way someone might move to a new screen in a web conference, symbols floating in from the ether. “She’s saying, ‘One child,’—OK, then tell me about the one child. She said she lost a child.”

And here my skull and neck grew cold, because I hadn’t told her that Julia had lost a child.

Sarina had also lost a child. Her son was named JT, she told me, and he had died at age seven of the flu—not because he was immune-suppressed or otherwise unwell, but because horrible things just happen, sometimes, for no apparent reason. JT developed a fever, and five days later he was dead. She hadn’t known she had mediumistic skills until afterward, when JT came to her and said that this was her calling: to serve as a bridge between children who had died and the parents they left behind. JT became Sarina’s spirit guide. I remembered then that the friend who had recommended Sarina had, like Julia, lost an infant very soon after childbirth. Sarina specialized in bereaved mothers.

Sarina started to speak, then stopped herself. “I’m trying to put words in her mouth and she’s saying, ‘Don’t say that!’”
She paused. “Obviously, that”—losing baby Henriette— “was a huge event, but that’s not when things shifted. Things shifted before that.”

I thought of Julia’s sister Sofie coming from Germany to help, and Julia’s trip with Blandina. Julia was already suffering. She was far from home and family, married to a man who wasn’t, perhaps, the easiest to love. And the physical and emotional demands of motherhood, the debilitating love and the mind-numbing tedium—they had, as Sarina saw it, already taken their toll.

Sarina looked for Abraham. “I’m still not seeing your great-great-grandfather, where is he in this?” She looked off into space again. “He’s distant. I feel him being very distant.” Julia showed Sarina two children: “I see a boy and a girl—she’s showing me two.” Sarina looked confused, and started conversing out loud again with the air to her right. Something had happened with a son, and Julia didn’t get to be there for it. “OK, so was it that son? No, it wasn’t that son. What do you want to tell me about these two?” The two kids, she said, were more like Julia’s parents as far as taking care of her; they were more functional than she was. Julia needed tending. And her children—Anna, Delia, Bertha, Paul, Arthur, Julius, Teddy—suffered for it.

I asked Sarina if Julia had ever been chained to a radiator. “She’s saying yes.” But Julia told Sarina that she wasn’t insane. “She knows that some people think that she went crazy, but she never lost her mind and she wants you to know that. Yeah, she shut down, but she always had her mind, and it’s important for her to say that.”

And why, I asked finally, is she a ghost? Sarina interrogated the air. Julia knew she was dead, Sarina said, and part of her had already left. But part of her stayed in the house, trying to correct
something that had gone wrong. Julia couldn’t leave the house; she simply couldn’t. “I have never seen this before,” Sarina said, one portion of a soul leaving, and one staying.

Julia’s soul had fragmented, like her story. And I was beginning to wonder whether I’d be able to put it back together.

Bertha (right) and Delia Staab as teenagers.

Family collection.

T
he ghost version of Julia’s life goes like this: In 1883, the baby died, and Julia shut herself in her room—her elegant, long-dreamed-of, newly realized room. She suffered and grieved, and her hair went white, and she never left the house again. This is the story in the ghost books and on the Internet; it is the story I wrote when I was twenty-four and living in New York.

But as I delved further into the records, I saw another story. Sarina was right: it isn’t always one thing that undoes us. Life goes on after loss—even the loss of a child, as hard as that is for me to imagine. Julia had, in truth, been lucky in the health of her children. She still had six healthy children—seven including the disabled Paul—while many mothers of the era saw few infants grow to adulthood. Julia suffered immense sorrow, as grieving parents do. And she had suffered even before she lost the baby, from depression and a keen sense of displacement. But she didn’t come completely undone—not at that point, anyway. She remained in the world.

Henriette died in July. But as I pored over old newspapers, looking for signs of Julia’s further deterioration, I found that in fact, she seemed more active than she had been before. Her name began to appear more frequently in the newspapers. In early October, three months after Henriette’s death, Julia and her family traveled east. “A. Staab, Esq, accompanied by Mrs. Staab and his three charming daughters, Misses Anna, Adele and Bertha, have left for New York City,” reported the
Santa Fe Review
. “Mr. Staab will remain absent for about a month. Mrs. Staab will visit at the house of her brother-in-law”—Zadoc—“for several months”—to recover, perhaps?—“and the Misses Staab will commence a three-years-course at the seminary of Miss Froelich in New York City.”

The girls had previously been educated at the Convent of Loretto, established by nuns the archbishop had imported to Santa Fe. While Abraham’s Spiegelberg cousins established their own nonsectarian academy, Abraham and Julia preferred their daughters to be educated by nuns. The convent was a refined institution, with courses in such disciplines as reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, astronomy, “orthography” (spelling), natural philosophy, botany, and needlework. Classes were taught in French and Spanish “equally,” and designed to develop the girls’ “intellectual faculties”
and train them in “the paths of virtue.” The students said prayers in chapel each morning; Abraham and Julia seemed not to mind. It was not inexpensive—three hundred dollars a year, with additional fees for piano, guitar, drawing, Italian painting, and making artificial flowers. “The girls of this academy consider themselves the upper ten,” Sister Blandina explained in her diary. “As far as money goes they are.”

As far as money goes, Julia’s children were in the upper one, the upper zero, the heavens-high Santa Fe ionosphere. There was no one in New Mexico much richer than Abraham, and it was expected that his children would have all the educational advantages of that echelon. The year before they left for school in New York, Julia acquired a governess for the girls. (“Wanted,” she advertised in the
New York Herald
, “A Governess To Go to New Mexico and take charge of three young ladies; must bring good references and be conversant with the English, German, and French languages, and capable to teach music.”) Julia stayed in New York to interview prospective candidates, keeping a room at the Rossmore Hotel, an ornate midtown establishment.

New York City was the heart of the nineteenth-century German Jewish diaspora—the Lehmans and the Goldmans, the Loebs and the Schiffs—Jews who had arrived, like Abraham, in the 1840s and 1850s and had peddled, traded, sold, and manufactured their way to dizzying wealth. It was the world to which Santa Fe’s Jews moved when they made their fortunes—most of them, though not Abraham and his family—and to which the rest aspired: “a world,” wrote Stephen Birmingham in his 1967 book
Our Crowd
, “of quietly ticking clocks, of the throb of private elevators, of slippered servants’ feet . . . of sofas covered in silver satin.” There were “heavily encrusted calling cards and invitations,” balls and charities, “little boys in dark blue suits and fresh white gloves,” girls in satin dresses, German governesses, English butlers, Irish maids, French chefs. Finger bowls were mandatory at the dinner table; rooms were littered with Dresden figurines and
bronze cherubs and fringed lamps; damask, marble, pigeon’s-blood velvet, pianos draped in Spanish shawls. It was a world of private ballrooms and dinners for sixty, of a mass summer exodus to Adirondack camps and the New Jersey shore, and, every two years, “the ritual steamer-crossing to Europe.” Abraham’s brother Zadoc lived in that world. Though he was not as stratospherically rich as the Lehmans and the Loebs, he moved in their circles. The same rabbi from Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue married his children; he joined the same clubs, attended galas at the same events: the Harmonie Club, the Purim Ball, the Hebrew Charity Fair.

New Mexico was a young territory, still in the process of cleaving itself from Mexico, and it was poor. The Santa Fe upper crust couldn’t replicate the flamboyant wealth and grandeur of their East Coast brethren, nor could they hobnob in such rarefied Jewish circles—there weren’t enough Jews in New Mexico to form a circle. But the Staabs made their best New Mexico approximation. They occupied the heart of Santa Fe, literally—with the huge storefront right on the Plaza and the big, towering house a few blocks away—and also figuratively. The New York Jews, wealthy though they were, kept to themselves; they socialized together and vacationed in the same places. The Jews in Santa Fe mixed with Gentile society in a way their New York brethren still could not or did not. In New Mexico, they were “Anglo,” as long as they were white. The smaller distinctions that reigned in the East and in Germany—high WASP, low WASP, Irish, Italian, Jew—didn’t seem to matter.

On Thursday afternoons, Julia and her daughters took callers. The butler, McCline—he was African American, not Irish—greeted visitors at the door and showed them into the parlor. There were many guests of all creeds: business folk and politicos, society wives and soldiers. They accepted each other as equals. As the army moved in and out of Santa Fe fighting the Indian Wars, the Staab girls found themselves
in great demand among the bachelor officers stationed at Fort Marcy. They danced in the eye of the social whirl. There were teas, sewing circles, reading clubs, dances, balls, riding parties, champagne and oysters, boxes at the Albuquerque opera. The girls rode sidesaddle and carried gold-headed riding crops. The boys—Arthur, Julius, and Teddy, who also went east to prep schools—wore tennis whites and striped sweaters and looked every bit the nineteenth-century swells.

Julia was around for all of this. She went on family visits to New York twice a year and also took regular trips to Germany to visit her family. In Santa Fe, she visited friends and took callers. In his journals, the Swiss anthropologist Adolph Bandelier, who explored New Mexico’s Indian cultures during the 1880s—combing villages and ruins for specks of bone and obsidian—wrote of receiving visits from Julia and her daughters, even from the mentally impaired oldest son Paul, and also of visiting them in their home. “Went to Staab’s,” he wrote, “and spent rather a lonesome hour there.” Most of his visits seemed less lonesome, however: Julia and Bandelier’s wife, Josephine, were friendly. Josephine visited Julia, and Julia also visited Josephine—Julia took herself out of the house and made some effort, it appears. They went on carriage rides together; attended the same parties, and spent a number of “pleasant” evenings together, Bandelier wrote. Julia had
friends
—which made me unaccountably happy. She may have been grieving and lost, but she wasn’t always the recluse the ghost stories made her out to be, that I once made her out to be. She was out in the world still, visiting and being visited, attending cheerful parties. (“At night, party at Koch’s until midnight,” wrote Bandelier. “Mostly Jews. Pleasant.”)

Julia didn’t travel to New York with Abraham and the girls in 1885 when they returned to school for their third year, but she was very much in evidence in Santa Fe society—seen in December of that year at a housewarming party for a clothing merchant named Gerdes, a lively affair that began at 9:00 p.m, saw supper served at midnight,
and featured dancing to the music of the Thirteenth US Infantry string band. She received callers at home on New Year’s Eve, a regular tradition; she went to California with her two oldest daughters for three weeks in January 1887.

In February of that year, Abraham, Julia, and all three girls traveled to Colorado to celebrate the opening of the railroad line between Denver and Santa Fe. Abraham had, years earlier, transported a large group of New Mexico’s territorial legislators to Denver in hope of bringing a direct line to Santa Fe—he had paid all the expenses for the trip and had given each legislator a top hat and gold-headed cane. The legislature soon issued the necessary bonds, and in 1887 the first train motored up the line from Santa Fe to Denver. It was composed of “seven coaches, six elegant chair cars and a Pullman sleeper,” reported the Denver
Rocky Mountain News
, and it arrived in Denver at ten o’clock at night bearing Abraham, Julia, their daughters, and a hundred-plus other Santa Fe residents. There was a ball the next evening. “Mrs. Staab and the Misses Staab enjoyed the privileges of the dancing floor,” the newspaper reported. Anna wore pink silk with white lace trimmings; Delia “an elaborate toilet of corn-colored satin”; both wore “some very fine diamonds.” Julia was seen dancing, too, in “a handsome robe of ruby plush, white lace trimmings; diamond ornaments.” She danced into the night. Perhaps she still mourned her lost child; perhaps she still suffered from various mental or physical ailments. But she was nonetheless out accompanying her husband and chaperoning her daughters. It seems she wasn’t as damaged in the years after Henriette died as everyone believed.

Julia traveled to New York again in the summer of 1887, and she spent the winter of 1888 there with her daughters. In February 1889, Anna—Julia’s oldest—married an Albuquerque Jewish merchant named Louis Ilfeld. Abraham added an extra room to the back of the house for the occasion, glassed on two sides to afford a view of Julia’s
gardens. “Precisely at 7,” the
New Mexican
reported, “the bridal party was ushered into the double parlors, the bride’s mother”—Julia—“leaning upon the arm of the groom and the bride following, escorted by her father.” Anna wore a “magnificent robe of white faille Francais cut en train, with point lace and orange blossoms.” A judge married them, not a rabbi; then the party proceeded to the Palace Hotel. At the entrance to the hotel “was one feature which deserves special attention,” the newspaper gushed. “In small gas jets appeared, three feet long, the letters ‘A. and L.’”—Anna and Louis, her groom. It was very resplendent, very American. Dancing commenced at nine, and the party ate dinner at midnight. Julia was there, out of her room, looking lovely—she wore a dress of red velvet. For a time at least, she found it possible to rise to these occasions.