American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (18 page)

The Bad Pyrmont waters were used to treat anemia, “weak blood,” malaria, neurological problems, impotence, bedwetting, “albumin in the urine,” a “calloused heart,” “English sickness,” and “masculine sexual malfunction” such as excessive sperm production and “shrinkages.” They were thought to be particularly helpful for problems like Julia’s—“the so-called women’s conditions,” wrote a Dr. Seebohm, who published a travel guide touting Bad Pyrmont around the time Julia visited: “blood and mucous flows, irregular and painful periods, problems during pregnancy and post-partum, infertility.” That July, Julia spent weeks in bathtubs, sopping up the waters. What she suffered, mental or physical, the doctors of Bad Pyrmont believed they could relieve.

Along with all the dousing and soaking, Bad Pyrmont offered plenty of socializing. Bertha was excited at the prospect. German spas, frequented by royalty and the growing class of people who lived like royalty, played an important role in the elaborate social rituals of the wealthy. Princes and hangers-on passed through Bad Pyrmont regularly. Peter the Great visited in the eighteenth century; Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was said to have accidentally invented the trouser crease while on holiday there in the nineteenth. The iconic German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited as well, finding Bad Pyrmont’s vapor caves mesmerizing: “the soap bubbles happily dancing on the invisible elements, the sudden extinguishing of a lambent straw smudge, the instant ignition of a candle.” Tens of thousands of people came there each summer.

Indeed, Herr Willeke thought it impossible that Julia and Bertha could have stayed in Bad Pyrmont for longer than a week. It was simply too crowded to accommodate lengthy stays, he told us, and too expensive. I knew from the diary, however, that Julia and Bertha did stay for longer. They had the money, clearly, and also the motivation: they were desperate to get Julia better. Intrigued, Herr Willeke looked again at Julia’s entry on the
Kurliste
, running a stout finger down the musty column that announced the guests’ sleeping arrangements. When he found Julia and Bertha’s lodgings, he clucked in excitement. They had taken rooms at the private pension of Frau Alice Breithaupt. He knew exactly where.

We descended from the library tower, clambered into the Audi, and threaded the streets to a hillside overlooking a small park. The pension of Frau Breithaupt—Julia’s home during her stay in Bad Pyrmont—was an oddly shaped three-story building at the intersection of two angled streets. Ivy climbed the gray plaster facade, which was punctuated by an arched door, elaborately linteled windows, and a curly wrought-iron
balcony. A century and a quarter after Julia’s stay, a restaurant now occupied the ground floor, and the offices of a financial adviser and a mediator resided on the second floor. The top floor still housed dwellings, their large windows full of light. I imagined Julia standing at the third-story balcony, the valley spreading out beneath her, breathing the healing air. It was a good location, Herr Willeke assured us—close to the
Kurpark
and the baths. We must have looked a strange group, staring up at this old building, Herr Willeke in his timeworn blazer, gesturing hurriedly, me with my notebook and smartphone, taking notes and photos, my petite gray-haired mother bouncing between us, translating gamely. We walked around the side of the building for another view, and Herr Willeke pointed at the building just downhill from Frau Breithaupt’s. He told us it served during Julia’s time as a home for illegitimate children, produced by the couplings of spa guests and the local servants.

There was plenty of coupling in Bad Pyrmont, he said, illicit and otherwise. These days, the odds were much better for those in Herr Willeke’s set. “It’s a good place to find wealthy widows,” he joked. Back then, however, the spa was a marriage market for the young: a place not only to heal, but to mingle. “It was very common,” Herr Willeke told us, “that girls came there looking for husbands.” Bertha, alas, wasn’t able to mingle nearly as much as she would have liked. She was stuck alone with her invalid mother. “Mamma is not able to go out much—Do not know a soul,” she wrote. Thus she “was awfully glad” when Abraham and Delia came from Carlsbad to join them a week after she and Julia arrived. Other family—Bertha’s spinster aunt Regine and her aunt Bernhardine and uncle Bernhard Nussbaum—also visited from Hanover. Julia appeared cheered by her siblings, Bertha wrote; they were part of the cure. Some of them, however, irked Bertha. “I cannot bear Uncle N”; Uncle Nussbaum, Bertha wrote, “grunts all the time and thinks everything I say funny—not silly but foolish.” She
could bear his son Arthur better. “Took walks with Arthur N to the Erdfalle and Bomberg—very pretty walks.”

Besides the relentless promenading along the Kurstrasse—bonnets and bustles and ruffles and gloves, full regalia—there were, during high season, garden parties, balloon rides, fireworks, three Princely Cure Ensemble concerts each day, and five theater performances each week. Bertha attended a number of shows. “Am gone on an actor who plays in the Pyrmonter Theatre—Very good-looking—Hermann Leffler,” she wrote—he would later become a star of Berlin theater and early German film. “He hasn’t vouchsafed me a glance, however.” Even Bertha’s foolish starstruck moments seemed momentous to me, reading them a hundred and thirty years after they were written; they were antediluvian in their language but somehow modern in their sentiments.

Bertha also managed to attend some of the Saturday promenade balls in the Kurhaus reception hall. “Fri 24th July—mamma was sick,” she wrote in her diary, alarmed that she might not be able to attend that week’s ball. Julia’s progress in recovering from her surgery had proceeded slowly. By Saturday, however, she seemed well enough that Bertha and Delia could attend the ball. But it was a disappointment: “No gentlemen came near us. The proportion of ladies to gentlemen was ten to one.” So the Staab girls, brashly, made do. “Delia and I danced together, also with a Fräulein Kasse from Berlin—and thereby astonished” the dignified Europeans who were present. In America, their propriety seemed dowdily German; in Germany, they were daring and American.

In Lügde’s Jewish cemetery.

Courtesy of the author.

H
aving exhausted Bad Pyrmont’s Julia-related archival resources, we climbed back into Herr Willeke’s ancient Audi and set out for Lügde. The road from Bad Pyrmont to Lügde barreled straight alongside the autobahn, past car dealerships, factories, and warehouses, until the highway tunneled under the old town of Lügde. From there we left the larger road and curved up a hill, winding up to an ancient Romanesque
stone church built on the spot where Charlemagne celebrated Christmas in the year 784. Herr Willeke parked the Audi on a gritty shoulder and we strolled over to the church. It was cold inside the thick stone walls, the late autumn light chinking in through a few high windows. Outside, Herr Willeke told us about a rosebush said to bloom eternally over an image of the Virgin Mary found in a stone on the site; now an equally miraculous eight-hundred-year-old linden spread its limbs above us. We would see more of Lügde, Herr Willeke promised, but first: lunch.

He drove us to a hotel in the hills above town, worth it for the view alone—a patchwork of green, the river Emmer lazing past, narrow roads that wound through tunnels of beeches and lindens, past apple orchards, stone farmhouses, handsome feudal villages, and picture-book forest, weeping trees in autumn opulence. The hills ascended gently toward Köterberg—Mount Bow-Wow. How Julia must have loved the place this time of year. As I gazed out across the lush scenery of Julia’s childhood, I found it easier to understand what she must have felt was taken from her.

In the restaurant, Herr Willeke ordered carefully. He had thin, white wrists, and delicate hands that seemed not to fit his otherwise meaty frame. He was, he told us, allergic to all sorts of things—nuts, honey, milk, beer—everything except meat and processed foods. He sang in a choir and he had run, several times, for local office as a Social Democrat—but it seemed to me that the past was, somehow, more real to this beer-sensitive German than the present moment in which we sat looking over the Pyrmont valley and Lügde, eating
Schwein
. There was a wistful formality about Herr Willeke. We wandered the same bygone world, he and I, sifting through ghosts, mining the past for clues to the present.

On the way down from lunch, we wound through the new section of Lügde, built after World War II to house German refugees from what was originally Silesia, now part of Poland. Other migrants, mostly
Turks, lived there now, their ersatz
Fachwerk
half-timber homes clinging to the hillsides. Herr Willeke pointed out seven small chapels—stations of the cross—and the place where the flaming
Osterrad
hay wheel still rolled downhill each Easter, as it had for hundreds of years. “It was a tradition which the Schusters”—Julia’s family—“would have known,” he said. I imagined the Schusters gathered to watch: Julia as a child with her many siblings; Julia bringing her own children from the New Mexico desert to see the wheel retracing the same path year after year, a tradition that would outdate and outlive them all. It was odd, to feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been and a tradition I’d never witnessed, but I did. There are places that always bring a flood of childhood ghosts: the stunted forsythias at the entrance to my elementary school; the crackling ponderosa forest behind my great-grandfather’s stone home in the New Mexico foothills. On this redolent autumn day, Lügde swamped me with a similar wistfulness.

We climbed back into the Audi and descended toward the old village, parked at the edge of what was once the upper city gate, and wandered uphill to a fenced-off park sandwiched between a housing project and an elementary school. Herr Willeke led us to a wrought-iron gate hung between two ivy-mounded brick posts and adorned with a Jewish star. This was the Jewish graveyard—the Schustergarten, they called it, because the town’s Jews had purchased it in 1887 from Julia’s mother, the widow Schuster, in order to relocate an earlier plot beside the town wall. We strolled across well-tended grass toward the stone grave markers: some upright, some listing. The first stone we reached was that of Philipp Schuster, who died in a 1866 cholera outbreak that killed “126 people and one Jew,” according to town record-keepers. Philipp was that one Jew—Julia’s cousin, who died the year that she arrived in America, his stone a reminder that in 1866, in Lügde, a Jew was not considered entirely a person. Julia’s family—and Abraham’s—came from here, but they never belonged.

We found Julia’s father’s gravestone as well: Levi David Schuster, who died on May 16, 1877. That was, I realized, only two weeks before Sister Blandina accompanied a troubled Julia by horse-drawn coach to Trinidad so she could take the train east to New York and travel from there to Germany. Julia’s father had only just died. The trials of motherhood and “female problems” and loneliness may have helped form her sadness in the days when Blandina cared for her, but something much more specific also played a part: an ocean and a continent away, Julia’s father was gone.

Even after all the months I had spent digging through her past, Julia remained so tantalizingly remote. I was coming to know the people around her—Bertha through her diary, Abraham through his public presence. But Julia, sequestered by time and disposition, continued to elude my understanding. Now, however, I had learned that she had lost a parent. This sadness I could understand. Of course she was unhappy; she was mourning.

We passed some graves so heavily mounded in ivy that it was impossible to find the stone—Herr Willeke, who kept a map of the graveyard in his house, assured us they weren’t Schusters or Staabs. In the back corner, we found a familiar name, “Jette Staab, geb Spiegelberg”—Abraham’s mother, who had married Moses Staab in 1832. She was a Spiegelberg by birth, which explained, a little better, how Abraham came to Santa Fe. He and the Spiegelberg brothers must have been first cousins; his mother was a sister to their father. The stones told us this much.

We climbed back in the Audi and drove slowly now, inside the city walls, along a cobbled street to Herr Willeke’s home, a classic frame-and-timber house that had been occupied by his family for more than two centuries. There was a gingerbread humility about Lügde’s houses, with their
Volk
writing on the beams above the entry doors—Herr Willeke’s offered the information that it had been built in 1806
and renovated in the 1860s; a door lintel down the road took a more confrontational approach: “May all my enemies die suddenly and come back as ghosts.” Lügde was full of ghosts, Herr Willeke told us with a quick smile. And I could feel them: if not the specific ghosts, then at least the weight of the past.

We wandered two blocks down Herr Willeke’s street on foot, into the center of town. A bridge ran across the Emmer, its banks stacked with riprap against the summer floods. A park and a playground occupied the upriver meadows; we could see an electrical wire factory a few hundred yards downriver. We headed back up another cobbled street of large
Fachwerk
homes—all thirty meters long, many built in the 1600s. Their plaster-and-wood patchwork facades were reassuring in their Old World sameness, house after house with steep shingled roofs and big arched front doors.

We walked around Lügde’s cathedral—it was tall and dignified, of brown brick, a bit dark. It had been built in 1895, Herr Willeke said, and during the construction, the town’s Jews had given money for the rose window in the front. “This was not unusual across Germany,” he told us; Jews often contributed to the construction of Catholic churches in the villages and cities where they hoped to remain in good graces. The cathedral had replaced an older church that stood during Abraham’s and Julia’s childhoods. And above the door of that church, Herr Willeke said, four letters were chiseled in Hebrew:
JHWH
, Yahweh.

Abraham had been familiar with tetragrammaton engravings on churches. He had known, well before Archbishop Lamy ever built his cathedral in Santa Fe, that they were not uncommon. Abraham was not “totally ignorant” of the fact that those Hebrew letters adorned Catholic churches across Europe, as Rabbi Fierman had posited. So perhaps he had funded the cathedral after all; perhaps he had asked Lamy to place the Hebrew letters above the door as a symbol of the contribution of Santa Fe’s Jews to the city’s spiritual life and material
foundations, and also, perhaps, as a reminder of the church of his and Julia’s childhood.

We walked past an ice cream shop that occupied a house where some Schusters had lived long ago, and watched two small Turkish children playing tag. Around the corner, we found the home where Julia had lived as a child. It was another
Fachwerk
house—large, with brown timber and white plaster, many symmetrical windows, a tall peaked roof, and an arched door. An air-conditioning unit stuck out incongruously on the right side—not every house stands unaltered as a monument to the men who built it. It was now a clothing store, Herr Willeke explained, hands aflutter. The store was closed, so we couldn’t go in—it wouldn’t have resembled the home of Julia’s childhood anyway.

Back at Herr Willeke’s house, in the upstairs sitting room that served as his archive, we pored over documents he had copied from the
Stadtarchiv
. We had climbed a steep set of low-ceilinged stairs and wound through many small rooms to get to the sitting room, where every available patch of wall space, every shelf, was covered in bric-a-brac: putti, knickknacks, portraits of family members in baroque frames. Herr Willeke served us tea and showed us his files. The Jews of Lügde had, of course, been erased as thoroughly there as they had everywhere in Germany, but their presence remained in the village that once abided them, and also in Herr Willeke’s papers—as letters and numbers, words and names. We spent the rest of the afternoon at his coffee table examining stacks of paper that Herr Willeke had diligently, tenderly copied from the archives: census records, a map of the graveyard, chronicles of Lügde’s Jewish families, whose histories ended mostly in America if they were lucky, or in the camps and ghettos of eastern Europe if they were not.

The light was fading as Herr Willeke drove us home. We had spent a long day of searching for people long dead. But with the help of Herr
Willeke—so formal and prickly, and also endearing—I had found something of Julia in Lügde. They were small clues, quiet whispers from the past. Her home did not stand apart like the mansion in Santa Fe; it resembled the homes to the left and right, up and down the street. The chronicle of the cholera epidemic in the town records reminded me starkly that the year Julia left for America, a Jew was still less than a person in her hometown. And the moss-and-ivy-draped stones of the Schustergarten informed me that, far from home, Julia had learned of her father’s death and set off, through wild lands rampaged by Billy the Kid, to pay her respects. We had unearthed in that Lügde cemetery one small fragment of her unhappiness.

What we had learned of Abraham was less affecting, and it wouldn’t solve the debate as to how the Hebrew letters came to be carved above the Santa Fe cathedral door. But Herr Willeke’s description of the old Lügde church had given us this much: Abraham could hardly have been ignorant of the custom of the tetragrammaton. And perhaps he, like his wife, also valued some reminder of his village past.

The next morning, the good Herr met us in the Fürstenhof breakfast room and drove us to the train station. His propriety in squiring us through Julia’s world was touching; he might have been a Bad Pyrmont gentleman of Bertha’s day. As we detoured past the Schloss Pyrmont, the large stone-and-plaster castle that loomed above the
Kurpark
, he repeated a saying: “Those who drive past the castle will always come back.” He regarded me for a long moment in the rearview mirror. “But don’t come back as a ghost,” he said. “We have enough ghosts.”