American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (13 page)

I
ARRANGED TO MEET
John, a ghost tour guide, at the obelisk that sits in the center of Santa Fe’s Plaza. The obelisk was erected in 1868, two years after Julia arrived, to honor the territory’s Civil War casualties as well as federal troops “fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the territory of New Mexico.” The word “savage” was chiseled away from the marble in 1973 by a hippie in a hardhat, then scratched back in and chiseled out again.

I wasn’t sure I’d be able to find John among the homeless and skater kids milling around the Plaza, but it was quite obvious when I spotted him: Indiana Jones hat, leather vest, puffy-sleeved green tunic, cargo shorts, hiking boots, white tube socks. We shook hands and set off.

Our first stop was a Southwestern knickknack store on San Francisco Street, where, John told me, four basement spirits liked to throw clothes from the hangers. The clothing stayed put while we visited, however. Next we wandered through a saloon-themed restaurant—red velvet wallpaper, colored lamps, plank floors, a stamped tin ceiling, and a mechanical bull. The place had once been the site of a card room owned by the notorious madam Doña Tula. It was brimming, John said, with the ghosts of whores and gamblers. “The ghosts don’t want to quit,” he told me, “they’re having so much fun.” He gestured to the empty barroom with a dramatic flourish.

We moved on. Ghosts tend to congregate in places with a history of violence, John explained as we walked down Burro Alley, the short and once notorious city block where Julia had
lived as a young bride. It was paved now, and a statue of a firewood-laden bronze burro moped on one corner. There were no storefronts or whorehouses or homes full of children along the alley anymore, just the cleanly plastered sides of buildings that fronted elsewhere.

Still, the place reeked of another time, and it occurred to me that spirits tend to be seen in places that seem as if their best days are behind them. John told me that ghosts were everywhere in this city with so many pasts piled together—Indian, Spanish, Anglo; New Spain, Old Mexico, New Mexico; the Wild West, the tourist Southwest, surges of conquering cultures washing through the desert arroyos like spring floods. It is often the dispossessed and defeated who come back as ghosts, I’d read somewhere, the historical voiceless, finding voice.

We walked toward the low-porticoed rectangle of the Palace of the Governors, where the Spanish had once ruled the Indians with iron swords. On the doorway, an inscription once welcomed visitors:
VITA FUGIT SICUT UMBRA
. Life flees like a shadow. It does now; it did then, and even more quickly. There were beatings on this spot, John said, and hangings. Indians were enslaved here and rose up against their captors; priests were slaughtered; the Spanish governor’s head was tossed around the courtyard like a football. “It was the bloody tower of the Southwest,” he said. Now it was full of angry and ancient spirits.

La Llorona was another of these angry spirits, John told me. An Indian beauty who married a conquistador and gave birth to two children, she despaired when her looks faded and her man ran off. This was an old folk tale common across the Hispanic Americas. In the version John told me, La Llorona threw her two children into the Santa Fe River, hit her head on a rock in her frenzy, and died—another overwhelmed mother. Now
she wandered the banks of the river, which was not much of a river anymore but rather an intermittent stream channeled and deflected—a ghost river—looking for other children to drown. From the willows by the riverside, a bony arm would rise, a pale claw waiting to pluck wayward children and drag them into the water. She could sometimes be heard wailing by the river’s banks. John gesticulated vaguely toward the concrete channel a few blocks away.

We moved on, lingering at the porch of a pretty Victorian art gallery whose previous resident, a prominent Realtor, had moved out very quickly after he encountered a black-cloaked, waxen-faced figure who smelled of rotting flesh and froze all the houseplants. This was an evil ghost, but they are rare—“Only five percent of spirits are really evil,” John said. I wondered how he knew this, though I didn’t ask. The Indiana Jones hat did seem to lend him some authority. No one knew, John went on, why this particular ghost was in this particular place. “Could there have been a hanging post there?” John asked. Ghost stories are full of rhetorical questions; there are never solid answers when we probe among the dead.

The cathedral’s bells tolled the afternoon Mass, and John used the opportunity to tell the dubious story of Abraham and the cathedral, how Jewish money helped complete the upper half. “They say it’s a cathedral on the bottom and a synagogue on the top,” he joked. John had a lovely smile; there was a credulous sweetness to him. He pointed out the site of the archbishop’s gardens, where my grandmother had imagined Julia and Lamy eating apricots and reciting French poetry. It is now a parking lot, all those cuttings and blooms and fancies interred in asphalt.

Then we came to La Posada. We sat in the reception area that
wrapped Julia’s old house, drinking lemon water and looking at its front door. A mezuzah adorned the doorframe, and I could see Abraham’s gilt initials above the original entry—
A
.
S
.—as prominent as Yahweh’s on the cathedral.

John shared some details from Julia’s past, and just as Lynne had moved seamlessly between census records and dreams, John also had no difficulty transcending the line between fact and lore. He mentioned that Julia had watched from the top of the stairs while her youngest daughter entertained. That wasn’t hard to believe at all. He explained that a child had died in the house; I knew this was true. But he also noted that children sometimes see a ghost baby teetering at the top of the steps, because Julia’s son had fallen down the stairs and died. I hadn’t heard this story. And he speculated that Julia might have died of a laudanum overdose—though there was also a chance, he said, that Abraham had killed her. “The sixty-six-thousand-dollar question,” John opined, “is the nature of their marriage.” Yes, it was.

We wandered through the front door into the narrow hallway between the bar and the library. We admired the opulent brasswork, and John, sleeves swaying with each gesture, reviewed the various spots where Julia’s ghost had been seen: in the library, the bar, the Rose Room. He pointed upstairs in the direction of Julia’s suite, and told me how the faucet in Julia’s bathtub turns on and off of its own accord (“nineteenth-century ghosts are fascinated by plumbing fixtures”), and how the housekeeping staff never—“ever”—go upstairs alone, not since the day when a door slammed shut on a maid, the linens tossed themselves around, and the maid was unable to open the door to flee.

Julia’s ghost, John told me, is rarely quiet for more than a
month—but she also won’t show up on demand. People who book the room seeking Julia rarely find her. I probably shouldn’t expect to, either, he suggested diplomatically. It’s the unsuspecting ones who have encounters. “Spirits are like colts,” said John, “they’re skittish.”

The first page of Bertha’s diary.

Courtesy of the author.

I
n her family history, the dusty photocopy that I’d found in my great-grandfather’s mountain home, Aunt Lizzie mentioned a diary that had belonged to her mother: my great-grandmother, Julia’s third daughter, Bertha. It covered the years 1891 and 1892, when Bertha traveled to California with her father and then to Europe with both her parents. In Germany, Lizzie said, Bertha had written of a
“dreadful accident” that befell Julia, but Lizzie’s history didn’t say what it was.

I decided, after reading Lizzie’s book, that I had to find the diary. I wanted to know about the accident and Julia’s trip to Europe, and more than that, I needed to see and feel the pages that had once documented Bertha’s life, and perhaps her mother’s as well. I needed to have this connection.

The diary had to be somewhere; Lizzie’s children couldn’t have just thrown it away. So I emailed Lizzie’s daughter Nancy—Lizzie’s only living child. She told me she had seen the diary only once, after Lizzie’s death in 1980, and remembered the “fancy writing” inside. But her sister Judy had taken it. Judy had died in 2003, from a brain tumor, and Nancy didn’t know what had happened to the diary after Judy’s death.

Nancy suggested I try Judy’s husband, Ron, who had relocated to southern New Mexico and, Nancy thought, may have brought the family copy of Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
with him; perhaps he had the diary, too. I hadn’t known there was a family copy of
Mein Kampf
, nor that it was something that Jewish families typically handed down through generations, like a prayer book or a menorah. I emailed Ron, who didn’t know anything about the diary. He suggested I get in touch with his daughter Rhonda, who now lived at my great-grandfather’s summer home and had taken possession of Judy’s papers when she died.

Rhonda and I have always been close; she is eight years older than I, and as a child I idolized her. She is a free spirit with a thick mane of dark hair much like Julia’s, though Rhonda accessorizes hers with daring turquoise jewelry, and she is full of opinions and sass. Rhonda and her brother were my only cousins to grow up in Santa Fe, and it was she who told me most of the ghost stories I had heard about Julia when I was a teenager. She was deeply connected to our family’s history in New Mexico, so it surprised me, when I contacted her, to learn that she hadn’t looked through Judy’s papers in the nine years since her mother
died. Perhaps this was her way of managing her grief—packing the ghosts away for a while.

When I called Rhonda to ask about the boxes of Judy’s pictures and letters, she said they were piled up in a storage room and promised me she would go through them when she found a moment. A few months later, she and Nancy—up visiting from Albuquerque—examined the boxes, “& LO & BEHOLD,” wrote Nancy in an email, they “picked up a little book that is the diary of Bertha!!!!!!! YEA.” It was a small leather-bound notebook, Nancy said, three inches by six inches, and it contained writing so tiny that Nancy could hardly read it. A couple of weeks later I traveled down to New Mexico to see it myself. In it, I hoped, I could find some insight into Bertha’s life, her time, her place, her family, and most of all, her mother. I longed to find Julia in those pages.

The dark-brown leather was a little scuffed, but the pages were still relatively undamaged, browned and crumbling at the corners but white on the inside. On paper lined in a thin, pale-blue grid, Bertha had tracked her days in a neat, penciled cursive. She had also tucked small aspen leaves into the pages to press and preserve them. The leaves were 120 years old when I first opened the diary, but they were no more brown or brittle than last year’s dried flowers, their decline into dust suspended by care and happenstance.

I sat down to read the diary on the porch facing Hermit’s Peak—the same spot where I first read Lizzie’s remembrance of our family. I handled the book with the tips of my fingers, as if it were something exceedingly rare and precious, which it was—a direct line to Bertha and Julia, through Lizzie and Judy, Nancy and Rhonda, and now me. I couldn’t believe my luck. Finally, the dead would speak—no more parsing rumors and reading between the lines.

On the first blank page, Bertha had written with a fountain pen. This was her only entry in pen—large, looping letters, with little blots
where she lingered too long: “Bertha Staab, Santa Fé, New Mexico.” In smaller letters below she wrote, “Left Santa Fé with Papa for California on Feb 14th, 1891.” The diary continues in pencil, her voice more mundane than I had hoped and imagined it to be, detailing her activities both rousing and, more often than not, dull, beginning on the day Bertha and Abraham arrived in Los Angeles. Bertha had completed her three years of finishing school at Madame Froelich’s and was living at home in Santa Fe with Abraham and Julia, waiting, I suppose, to marry. I couldn’t ascertain at first the reason for the trip, but it was clear that this was an adventure for Bertha—her sisters had gone to California with Julia a few years earlier and it was now her turn to see the West Coast.

It had been an exhausting and jostling two-day train journey from Santa Fe. “Am tired when I write this at 11 o’clock at night—Have been sitting in lobby of Hotel all evening with a party of ladies and gentlemen who came with us on Pullman Sleeping Car—This morning at six got up to change cars at St. Bernardino,” Bertha wrote.

The next day, Bertha took a carriage ride around Los Angeles. Like her mother, Bertha seemed to have a particular fondness for plants and flowers. “Saw palms, several varieties—the first palms I had ever seen and yet they looked as familiar as if I had seen them every day.” She spied her first century plants—tall, hobnailed agave spires that didn’t actually live a century, but could survive a good decade or three and flowered only once and died shortly thereafter. She saw pampas grass, and “the spruce tree in different varieties” clipped into hedges and arches and columns and gateways. She rode past orange groves and “smooth lawns with lines of calla lilies and great big bushes of geranium and climbing roses in full bloom at this season of the year”—winter! She found the homes that flanked those beautiful gardens less impressive. They looked “old, time-worn and faded,” she wrote. Perhaps
they were, compared with her father’s nouveau-riche palace in Santa Fe.

Bertha was twenty-one, the same age Julia had been when she’d married and made her journey to America. In photographs, Bertha looks remarkably like her mother—tawny-skinned, with the same intense, close-together eyes; thick, silky, dark hair; half-moon cheekbones; and an ample bust. But she was a modern girl with expectations that were very different from her mother’s at the same age. Julia had married a Jewish man from her small village in the old country and had subsumed her life into his; Bertha, nowhere near married, spent her time gallivanting with Santa Fe’s elite. “This time to-night,” wrote Bertha in Los Angeles, “might be at home at the Governor’s reception, where I suppose at this minute they’re having a goodly feast—Ah! for a word with _ _ _ _ .” She pined for a man whose name, even in the privacy of her diary, she wouldn’t reveal. “‘I shall never see my darling any more,’” she continued, quoting a popular song about a slave whose sweetheart is sold away. Bertha was full of longing and self-consciousness and drama. She was bursting with the future, and I found her words sometimes agonizing to read. I can only imagine that my own journals from that age would seem equally cringeworthy to descendants riffling through them a century from now.

The day after her arrival, Bertha toured the Los Angeles basin. With her father and some friends they had met on the journey—a Mr. and Mrs. Crampton and a Mr. and Ms. K. Royce from Rutland, Vermont—she took the train to Redondo Beach to see “the Great Pacific for the first time.”

Had an hour’s trip fraught with no special interest except for the beautiful mountains—They loomed up in the far distance, their bases hidden by thick mists, their tops seeming to float in air and looking like immense white clouds.

Bertha clearly seemed to enjoy her time with her father; they had fun together. “Hired a three-seated rig for six persons. Managed to get seven in,” she wrote. They drove toward Pasadena, through the wheat fields and past the palms and olive trees, past roses and heliotropes that grew high above their heads. “Met several ‘Heathen Chinese,’” she wrote, “and accosted them but they vouchsafed us no answer.” She took lunch at a grand hotel in Pasadena, drank champagne, tasted persimmon for the first time, bought a silver spoon, visited the ancient San Gabriel Mission church (which was “not as curious for us because had seen others just like it in New Mexico”), dropped in at a winery, tasted sweet “Angelica” wine, and then headed back to Los Angeles. “It poured down but we did not mind, fortified as we were with gossamers, umbrellas and thick coats.” When winter rains socked in the next day, she fretted. “Been writing letters all morning,” she wrote. Abraham played whist with the men while “ladies looked on,” Bertha added. “Dull day.”

As one would expect from such a personal document, Bertha’s diary is much more about Bertha—where she went, what she did, how she felt, what she ate and drank—than Julia, who was home in Santa Fe, lingering just slightly offstage. And of course I hoped, as I scoured those fragile pages, that Bertha would shed some light on her mother’s temperament and state of mind; that she might help me crack the code. But as I read, I found myself more and more engaged in Bertha’s world—the world Abraham and Julia had created for her, and that now, as a young woman, she sought to make her own.

In the days that followed she shopped—buying another silver spoon—and socialized with other hotel guests. “Mrs. Schulte talked to us in her high cracked voice,” Bertha wrote. It seemed that Bertha had a tendency to mock. She spoke about books with a fellow guest named Mr. Wright. “His pet expression is ‘Well if you will’ or ‘If you do I’ll eat my hand’ which I recommended him to substitute for another expression.”
Her writing reminded me, painfully sometimes, of my own snobbish declarations at a similar age—the disdain of a young woman trying to decide who belonged in her tribe and who didn’t.

Bertha took walks when the weather cleared, and she expanded her circle of acquaintances. It seemed not to matter whether they were Jewish or not—at least Bertha didn’t mention it. Her judgments seemed to be rather more personal in nature. “Do not like Miss Smith’s face,” she wrote upon meeting a new crowd of guests.

Her nose is turned up—very suggestive of what she may be, but I do not know. Mr. B also forming one of their party is anxious to meet me thinks I have an intellectual face—First time I think anybody ever said that of me! The man must be of poor eye-sight.

Bertha wrote often of men—“gentlemen,” she always called them—and what they thought and said of her. She was a tad boy-crazy—more than a tad, actually—and as I read through the diary, I began to wonder whether Abraham hadn’t dragged Bertha along on his trip to separate her from the fellow for whom she pined—an army officer, perhaps.

For Abraham, the journey had multiple goals. His health needed tending—he was, according to the Santa Fe papers, receiving “electric treatment.” Bertha never mentioned what that treatment entailed, or what exactly ailed Abraham. But in addition to traveling for his health, it seems that Abraham had also journeyed to California in hopes of convincing the army to keep its troops headquartered at Fort Marcy in Santa Fe—the troops his business supplied. The War Department had recently announced that the Southwestern command was moving to California. So while Bertha shopped and socialized and explored, Abraham met with the military brass, hoping to persuade them to change their minds. “Met Col. Willard of the United States Army,”
Bertha wrote. “Said he did not think there were any prospects of having headquarters in Santa Fe.” Indeed, a letter arriving by post soon informed Bertha that the army—including all the officers who had squired and admired her—was already preparing to leave Santa Fe. Bertha “felt blue” about this. She longed to be among the officers. Instead, she was in California engaging in unsatisfying flirtations with unsatisfying men. “Mr. Wright said I had a good forehead—Rats!”

In Los Angeles, Abraham’s health did not rebound. They had planned to ride the cable car to downtown Los Angeles, but Abraham had a “weak spell” and sent Bertha with her friends. She saw a play,
Barrel of Money
, at the Los Angeles Theatre. “Could have been worse, but not much.” She took walks, wrote letters, read books, toured another winery, visited another orange grove, bought another silver spoon—this one for her sister—visited an ostrich farm, collected shells at the beach, and on the evening of February 26, went to see a strange performance at the Pasadena Grand Opera House. It was a show that defied logic, presented by a performer named Annie Abbott—“an ordinary-looking woman of about 28,” Bertha wrote, who did things that weren’t ordinary at all.