American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (21 page)

The Z. Staab Brothers building in Santa Fe.

Harmon Parkhurst, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 10779, 1925.

B
ack in the waning years of the nineteenth century, though, Abraham was the name on everyone’s lips. In the years before his trips with Bertha to California and with Julia to Europe, he was at the very top of Santa Fe’s social and political pyramid. In January 1890—a year before the family headed off to Germany for Julia’s cure—he at last changed the name of his firm from “Z. Staab & Bro.”
to “A. Staab.”—he was his own man now. Abraham was fifty years old, Julia forty-five. Their family was, by all appearances, thriving. The children—Paul excepted—were healthy. They were marrying, courting, heading off to university. Julia was still making the social rounds, out in the world. Everything was right. If only the world could have stopped revolving.

In November of that year, after a few years’ hiatus, Abraham again ran for county commissioner. The election was contentious; the local Democrats were not fond of Abraham. In the previous election cycle, the
New Mexican
reported, the talk at the Democratic county convention “consisted mainly of abuse of Mr. A. Staab.” This time, if anything, the malice had grown. The Democrats accused Abraham of pocketing money from county bonds issued a decade earlier to entice the railroads. The allegations rose to such a drumbeat that Abraham felt forced to reply. “The insinuation in the
Santa Fe Sun
”—the Democratic newspaper—“that I had any part in, or knowledge of, any ‘$16,000 bond steal of years ago,’ is willfully and maliciously false and unfounded. A. Staab,” he signed it. The
New Mexican
—the Republican newspaper—in turn accused the Democrats in power of embezzling county funds. “They hate an honest man with a deadly hatred,” opined the
New Mexican
. “They know that if Mr. Staab is elected, their career of crime and corruption is at an end, and that if there is any law in this country they will be punished.”

And so it went.

When the votes were tallied on election day, Abraham was found to have tied his opponent, a fellow dry goods merchant named Charles M. Creamer. The Democratic election judges, however, had thrown out a dozen votes for Abraham because they had been written in lead pencil instead of ink. To resolve the tie, the two candidates’ names were put in a hat, and Abraham’s was chosen.

All hell broke loose. The Democratic county clerk, insisting that
both of the names in the hat had been Abraham’s, refused to certify the election. The previous Democratic county commissioners also refused to step down. In order to take office, Abraham and his fellow Republicans formed a “shadow commission” and elected Abraham chairman. They must have had the sheriff on their side, because they managed to send the Democratic commissioners and county clerk to jail for contempt of court. The contested election eventually made its way up to the US Supreme Court, which ruled on Abraham’s behalf.

At the same time, the Democrats were in a lather about militia warrants. These were IOUs that funded armed squads the territory had raised to fight the Indian Wars in the late 1860s—money promised to volunteers at a later date if they joined the militias. After the battles subsided, however, the territory had no money to reimburse the volunteers, and the federal government had no interest in doing so, either. A few years later, Abraham, Thomas Catron, and some of their associates bought hundreds of such warrants for pennies on the dollar, hoping to cash them in later for dollars on the dollar. To persuade the legislature to recognize the warrants, many of which were probably fraudulent, Abraham offered, in a letter someone turned over to the
Santa Fe Sun
, $150,000 in payments to the territory’s legislators—$5,000 per legislator—to “defray the expenses” of their work in legalizing the warrants. Democrats believed it was a “bribing fund”—“a gigantic scheme,” the
Sun
wrote, “to debauch the legislature.”

The legislature formed a special committee to look into the militia warrants and the “Staab letter,” as it came to be called. The committee asked Abraham to testify about his efforts to sway the legislature, but he said that he was sick and could not give testimony. Abraham may not have been “the Al Capone of Santa Fe,” as the ghost stories suggested, but there was indeed a whiff of corruption about Julia’s husband. In early January 1891, the
Sun
reported that Abraham “has been recommended by his physician to go to sea level as soon as possible.”
Abraham ignored the advice at first. He recovered inside his Palace Avenue home, while the
Sun
continued to accuse him of “payola schemes,” of redirecting campaign money, and of general “boodle.” In mid-February, Abraham’s health grew worse. “A. Staab is quite ill again,” reported the
Deming Headlight
, “and will, in all probability, leave for California during the coming week, to consult a specialist upon his ailment.”

This time, Abraham did leave, repairing to Los Angeles, Redondo Beach, and San Diego. This was the same trip on which he and Bertha went wine tasting and saw the Great Pacific, on which Bertha duked it out with the Miss Pullmans for the meager supply of young gentlemen. Though Bertha had mentioned that Abraham was ill at times, he had seemed well enough to enjoy their travels. Yet while in California, he resigned his spot on the board of commissioners, citing his fragile health.

The papers fell quiet until early April, when the
Albuquerque Democrat
, keeping tabs on Abraham in California, brought forward a scandalous charge: “A. Staab, of Santa Fe, who is in California with his daughter on a health-seeking trip, recently lost $30,000, playing poker at Redondo Beach; and after giving his checks for that amount, he telegraphed home to stop payment on them.” Thirty thousand dollars—1891 dollars—in one night.

Aunt Lizzie wrote in her family history that every time Abraham played poker, he left a twenty-dollar gold coin under all his kids’ pillows. She believed it was to persuade them—and Julia—that he always won. Julia’s husband was a gambler, in every way. That’s how you made it in America. He had gambled on crossing the ocean at the age of fifteen; he had wagered on the hazards of transporting people and goods on the Santa Fe Trail; he had ventured to import a wife he barely knew; he had speculated in real estate and irrigation schemes and mines and militia warrants. Likewise, he gambled at the table.

But he didn’t always win. He lost thirty thousand dollars in that one sitting in Redondo Beach. He had lost the army headquarters, too, and the lucrative contracts they provided. He had selected a wife unsuited to the intrepid life he had chosen. And he had wagered that when New Mexico was admitted to the union, the militia warrants he had purchased would be paid off by the legislature. If they were, he stood to make more than a million dollars on the redemption.

The warrants never paid, however. I found some of them, yellowed and forgotten, in an envelope in Abraham’s slim folder in the New Mexico state archives, crowded alongside Flora Spiegelberg’s more expansive reminiscences. The warrants meant nothing to me when I first discovered them; only after reading the newspaper accounts of Abraham’s scandalous efforts to collect those IOUs did I understand just how much they meant to him. They obsessed and plagued him, these promises of easy riches—and they almost undid him.

Abraham had always been a careful curator of his reputation. Now, for the first time, he was a figure of ridicule. In every life, lucky streaks end. Lives go from golden to cursed, or merely to ordinary. The tide turns; the gods become mortal. “A. Staab, the Santa Fe merchant, whose speculations in New Mexico militia warrants and poker games, have become common talk in the territory, passed through to-day journeying home from the west,” wrote the
Las Vegas Optic
as he returned from California with Bertha in April 1891.

No wonder Abraham and the family turned right around and headed off to Europe. The Continent offered one kind of cure for Julia, and another for Abraham. Only one of them would be successful.

“I
LOOK FOR GHOSTS
; but none will force their way to me,” wrote William Wordsworth about a woman named Margaret, who had lost a child and been undone by grief. “The very shadows of the clouds / Have power to shake me as they pass.” The Margaret of the poem felt a terrible urgency to find her lost child’s ghost. My search for Julia was less fraught, but like Margaret, I was trying, through various assorted methods, to speak to the dead.

I decided to give medical marijuana a try. The psychics I consulted had told me that Julia might address me directly, if only I was open to it. It was the openness that vexed me. I am not a regular marijuana user—it makes me anxious. But a friend with a medical prescription gave me a cookie, and I took a tiny bite. Nothing much happened at first; I fell asleep. And then I woke an hour later, and I realized that everything looked pink.

This was OK, initially. But soon my thoughts began to tiptoe out of my head before I could finish thinking them. And my heart began to beat very loudly, and I began to worry for my health, for my future, for the world. My husband lay beside me in bed, sound asleep. I contemplated waking him, but I couldn’t imagine what he could do to help me. I glanced at my bedside clock. It said 11:11. An hour later, I looked again. It said 11:13.

I went downstairs and threw up. My stomach hurt not from gastrointestinal complaint but rather from panic. I wanted the cookie to go away. I brushed my teeth for what seemed an eternity, then turned on my phone and pulled up a search engine. “How long does edible marijuana last?” Though I knew the answer already: many more hours. I threw up again, commenced another epic tooth-brushing session, and tried another search:
“How come down weed?” I read something about orange juice. I drank orange juice. I tried to read, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I turned on the television; I couldn’t follow the plot. I sat bolt upright on the couch in the kids’ playroom, staring straight ahead. Back to my phone: “Die marijuana overdose?” I was only slightly reassured by the answer.

How had it been for Julia to battle these interior demons, the ghosts of the mind? My problem was now inside me, as Julia’s must have been. I thought of Emily Dickinson—another shut-in: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted,” she wrote. “One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.” Better to meet an “external ghost,” she wrote, “Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter / In lonesome place.” I didn’t want to meet myself that way. I didn’t want to be haunted.

I sat wretched, hugging my knees on the playroom couch, and I knew that if ever there were a time when I might be receptive to a voice from the other side, it would be now—my brain was unpeeled, my rational mind collapsed. I was open. I called for Julia. I waited with my hands on my thighs. I closed my eyes. I implored her: Come. Tell me what happened. Speak of the past.

But she didn’t, not yet.

Julia’s mother, Henriette Schuster.

Family collection.

B
y the time Abraham returned to Santa Fe from Europe, the papers seemed to have forgotten, or forgiven, his scandal-tinged departure—the ugly election, the gambling losses, the militia warrants. The
Santa Fe Sun
, which had goaded him ceaselessly six months before, welcomed him back: “A. Staab, one of the oldest and richest wholesale merchants in the territory, has returned to his beautiful
Santa Fe home from an extended European tour.” The
New Mexican
commented on his improved health. “Hon. A. Staab returned Saturday night looking hale and hearty and ready for any amount of business.” A few days after Abraham’s return, he sued his nephew Alexander Gusdorf for $29,861.85—for what, I couldn’t ascertain. Abraham was, indeed, ready for business.

Julia, meanwhile, had moved into a private villa at the spa in the Harz Mountains. Bertha and Delia accompanied her, tasked by Abraham with keeping her close and meeting her needs. “Tues 25 Aug 1891—We have unpacked everything,” Bertha wrote.

The villa is built very prettily; it is quite large and is situated right in front of the woods on a grassy slope overlooking the town. The air is very fresh; we can actually feel that it is pure. The principal thing is the utter restfulness of the place; it is very quiet—quieter even than Santa Fe. Astonishing but true. If mamma’s nerves don’t get strong here, I don’t know where they can.

Things were indeed quiet at the spa. For Bertha, young and impatient, time seemed to sputter out. “It seems ages that we’ve been here,” she wrote the day after they arrived.

We embroider, walk and read and read and embroider and walk—don’t know a soul and not likely to make acquaintances. Few people in the house and they are mostly old and have their meals served in their own rooms—but if mamma only gets well quickly all will be well.

In the days that followed, the girls continued to embroider, walk, and read. They composed witty poems directed at various young gentlemen of their acquaintance (“you pass the girls without a smile / and act in altogether a shabby style”). Time dawdled, excruciating and unhurried.
“Monday we will be here three weeks,” Bertha wrote in mid-September.

As yet mamma is not better. Her spells take place about every other day; she has one good and one bad day. To-day she has had the worst nervous attack she has ever had during this illness—hope it will not return again—Mamma was so discouraged that she wanted to go away from here at once—of course we cannot do that, for where shall we go?

Not knowing what to do, they wrote their aunt Adelheid and asked her to stay “for a week or ten days in order to help encourage mamma and so that she has somebody with her, who is more experienced than we are.” Julia saw her doctor each day. Sometimes he’d call on her, other times she’d go to see him. “He says mamma will get entirely better, but that nervousness doesn’t go away in a day but requires time and courage—The patient can do more for herself than others can do, by trying to be calm.”

A Mrs. Flechtheim—another spa patron—visited from time to time “to talk and enliven mamma.” Bertha and Delia would take walks with the Flechtheim family, “changing off” so that Julia was never left alone. They did a bit of sightseeing when they could, visiting whatever high points and monuments they could find in the nearby hills. In the absence of young gentlemen, Bertha flirted instead with Julia’s doctor.

I have made a conquest of him. He is old and married so there’s no danger! He told me that he had always imagined ‘Queen Mab’ in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” just like my sweet self!

Childish fancies, they were, but more enjoyable than what Bertha beheld in the earthbound world—the frightening tenacity of Julia’s
illness, the tide of her health ebbing further from shore. Julia was sick—in her head, and in her heart. “I hope this won’t last much longer, for it is dreadful,” Bertha wrote.

When Tante Adelheid arrived, Julia improved for a time. Adelheid was a “splendid nurse,” and everyone quickly cheered up. “Her arrival had a very good effect upon mamma’s condition,” Bertha wrote.

The day before aunt came Delia and I almost despaired, mamma looked so strangely and talked so mournfully. It seems that her condition was such a critical one that the least excitement, bad or good, could turn the scales for better or worse. Aunt’s arrival accomplished that; the beautiful change brought about by her coming seemed to take place at once and a slight but steady improvement has been going on ever since. Thank goodness the worst days are over and we need have no fears for her eventual entire recovery.

Bertha was happy to think that in her letters to Abraham, she might be able to offer more encouraging news, not the “same old tale of woe, ‘no change for the better.’ Now at least we can afford ourselves and him the satisfaction of hoping for speedy recovery.”

But Julia’s improvement was short-lived. After Adelheid went home, Julia returned to bed, and the family determined that the Harzburg spa had healed her no better than any other. They would stay another week in “this dullness and quiet,” Bertha wrote, and return to Hanover to be near Julia’s mother and sisters. “There is absolutely nothing new,” Bertha wrote. On sad days, Bertha reminded herself, “This too will pass away”; on gladder days, she tried to “enjoy the present.”

They left Harzburg in early October. “Mrs. A. Staab and daughters are in Hanover, Germany,” the
New Mexican
reported. “Mrs. Staab has been quite ill, but is slowly recovering and gaining strength.” But the
New Mexican
had it wrong. Julia wasn’t improving. She was descending
into an underworld from which the sunlit earth seemed more and more remote. Abraham, from afar, and his girls, at Julia’s side, could only look on as winter fell.

After a few days in a Hanover hotel, the three Staab women found longer-term quarters for the winter. “Rather small rooms but comfortable and what is most important mamma can have (in the way of eating) what she wants and that’s at any time.”

On November 13, Julia’s mother, Jette, the widow Schuster, died. The family held a service two days after her death, but didn’t tell Julia for another five days. “She had a very severe crying spell but after we had calmed her no bad effects,” Bertha wrote, “her nervous attacks are shorter but not less frequent yet.”

After that entry, Bertha wrote in her diary less frequently. In the weeks that followed, she and Delia had their photographs taken. They watched over their mother each day. Bertha was seized with a fit of self-loathing. “I wish I were beautiful in every way, rich, charming, lovely, happy!!” Winter settled in. Delia wrote to the Santa Fe newspaper, reporting that Julia was slowly improving but that the weather in Hanover was “simply abominable.”

They celebrated Christmas. Bertha didn’t seem to think this unusual, or if she did she didn’t mention it—this is what German Jews did in those years. If they were religious at all, these assimilated Jews tended to practice a mild “reform” version of their faith, couched in the language of the Enlightenment. They worshipped in gilded, neo-Gothic synagogues difficult to distinguish from the nearby churches, with pipe organs and German prayer books. They ate pork—bregenwurst, bratwurst, liverwurst. They spoke German exclusively—no more Yiddish. And on Christmas, they adorned fir trees with scented wax candles.

That Christmas in Hanover, Bertha received a case for her spoons from Delia, a black lace Spanish shawl and a dozen embroidered handkerchiefs
from Julia, a small painting from her brother Paul, and a new ring from Abraham, to replace the one she had lost in Los Angeles. She and Delia gave Julia a silver tea sieve.

On New Year’s Eve, they went to bed well before midnight—Bertha had come to expect less festivity in her life. During the short days of January, they learned to ice-skate, “and when we had learned, it thawed and thew and watered and sent our skates to rest on a nail in the wall.” And then, in mid-February, an awful thing befell Julia—something so bad that Bertha couldn’t bring herself to write of it. “Mamma had been progressing very very slowly from Nov till February 12,” Bertha wrote.

So slowly, that sometimes we doubted whether she improved at all. The last few days before that dreadful accident, we thought everything was going along nicely.—Delia thought of going to Cologne at the end of the month and our plans were beginning to look real and the future seemed to have a tinge of rosiness.

But no—that awful day the 12
^th
—I shan’t say anything about it—everything has turned out well and we must be thankful that it is not worse.

Mamma is in bed, but will get up in a few days. The bandages are to be taken off Friday and we pray and hope all will be well—

A letter was sent to Papa—instructing him and telling him all facts. The doctor said it was our duty. We have a sister to attend to Mamma’s wants.

And there the diary ended, along with the family’s hopes for a happier result for Julia. I imagined that the days and weeks that followed the abrupt ending of the diary must have been terrible for Bertha and Delia. For me, though separated from those raw emotions by the large gulf of history, it was an unhappy leave-taking, as well. I’d learn no
more about Julia’s “dreadful accident.” Bertha, who went on about every “young gentleman” who crossed her path, couldn’t bear to explain what had happened to her mother. Julia had been doing better, she said—which suggests that Julia’s condition took a turn for the worse, and that the “accident” somehow involved her condition. She was in bandages. It was months, now, after the surgery on her womb, so it was unlikely that the bandaging had anything to do with her surgical site. Had Julia wandered in the night and fallen? Had she been cut somehow? Wounded herself in the bathtub? I couldn’t know. Bertha wouldn’t tell. It was too horrible.

Abraham and the girls had trusted that Germany would help. Superior doctors, unrivalled spas, familiarity, family, sisters, home: they’d believed in happy endings—in an American fairy tale, all triumph and no decline. But Germany was no panacea. Bertha’s grand European adventure, Julia’s quest for health and healing—it was all ruined.