American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (22 page)

Wolfgang Mueller as a young man.

Courtesy of Sonya Mueller.

I
didn’t want the diary to end. There was so much I still needed Bertha to tell me. The last page contained a scrawled ledger noting what she had paid for various items: books, stamps, a curling iron, coffee, and three spoons (two dollars each). I scrutinized it, looking for answers.

I was disappointed that Bertha hadn’t told me everything I needed to know. But I was also grateful that something so personal had survived
the long years at all. It was a gift. The tactile realness of the document made me feel that much closer to my troubled family, and to the past—filtered though it was through Bertha’s twenty-one-year-old eyes, and stifled by all the taboos of the era: sex, female problems, illness, madness. I would have to accept that Julia remained unknowable, by dint of both time and disposition. But I now knew something, at least, of her moods and her travels, her pain, and the struggles of her children and husband as they tried to save Julia and came to grips, by stages, with the inevitability of her decline.

That was more than most of us know of our forebears. In most families, we have only stories, told from parent to child and from those children to their own, handed from generation to generation, stretched and twisted and muddled with each new telling.

I would have to rely on hearsay from there on out. I was of course a generation or three too far removed to learn anything firsthand. When my grandfather died in 2007, he had been the last of Julia’s living grandchildren—and he was born more than a decade after Julia died. Now, our oldest living relative was a woman named Betty Mae Hartman, my father’s second cousin and Julia’s great-granddaughter. She lived alone in a small adobe in downtown Albuquerque that was nothing like the stately home of her great-grandfather. It was a one-story building of modest ambition. Apparently, the dry goods dollars hadn’t sustained this branch of the family any more than they had my own. I visited Betty Mae—meeting her for the first time—on a blustery spring morning in 2012. She was ninety-three and walked unsteadily, ushering me through a dark carpeted living room full of family photographs to a large sunroom where she spent much of her time in a comfortable upholstered recliner. The room was cheerful and bright, cluttered with crocheted blankets and cushions and doodads.

Betty Mae had once been a beauty—a dark and dainty, simmering Jewish beauty. She still had the lush black eyelashes of a younger
woman and razor-sharp cheekbones, a scaffolding of loveliness that had withstood the havoc of age. Anna, Julia’s eldest, was Betty Mae’s grandmother. When Betty Mae was young, Anna lived with her husband, Louis, in a grand European-style home that Abraham had built for them in downtown Albuquerque; it had two stories, two parlors, a solarium, servants’ quarters, china service for eighteen, exotic birds, tennis courts, a garage, and two barns—one for horses, one for cows. In the summertime, Anna and Louis packed up the cows and moved to Abraham’s house in Santa Fe, where it was cooler.

Bertha, married by then to my great-grandfather, Max Nordhaus, lived down the street from Anna and Louis in an elegant neoclassical building. The two sisters were close—thick as thieves, Betty Mae told me. She perched in her chair in the sun, sharing stories from her childhood in Albuquerque, and when the memories ran out, we looked at photos from those long-ago times.

Before she sent me on my way, Betty Mae mentioned that she had, as a teenager, “gone out” with a second cousin named Wolfgang Mueller, who was a refugee fresh from Germany. He was, she told me, a grandson of Julia’s youngest sister, Emilie. He knew all about Julia’s family in Germany, she said. I found his phone number, and when I returned home to Colorado, I called him.

Wolfgang lived in Washington, DC, where he had moved after serving in the army during World War II. He had run a meat supply company for many years, and then, in his seventies, he’d started a fish supply company. “If you visit,” he promised, his voice resounding, German accent still thick, “I will feed you fish. Very fresh.” I mentioned that I had met Betty Mae. He had also seen her recently in New Mexico, he told me. I started to tell him that she was still quite striking, but he interrupted. “At one time she was very lovely,” he said, “but she has aged a lot.” He paused for a moment. “I have weathered the time very well.”

He had indeed. At the age of ninety-three, he still played tennis
almost every day. He traveled to Europe regularly—he was leaving in a few weeks, he told me, for a river cruise on the Danube. It took me until autumn to arrange to visit him at his large and tastefully appointed townhome in Washington, where he did, as promised, feed me very fresh halibut. He looked as if he were still in his seventies, with a full head of brown-streaked hair; his eyebrows were black. He had a robust bearing, and his plummy, deep voice contained none of the quavers of age. His skin was smooth, preternaturally so—I wondered, idly, if he’d had some work done. In this family, there were people like Wolfgang, with his booming confidence, and like Flora Spiegelberg, with her civic projects and campaign for world peace, and my grandfather, who fought World War II on skis and built a tram up to the crest of the Sandia Mountains and spent a long legal career fighting for Native American rights. These were people who lived long and full lives. They were satisfied, immodest, unapologetic: happy.

Wolfgang didn’t remember Julia; he had lived almost a century, but he was still too young. He remembered some of Julia’s sisters, though. They were, he told me, a “very distinguished Jewish family in Westphalia.” Their children studied at the best schools and universities, joined tennis clubs, collected art. The Schusters broke barriers: children of merchants and peddlers, they were elected to the Reichstag and became leaders in the banking sector, in the law, and in publishing. America wasn’t the only place where a Jew could make inroads into the larger world. Julia’s nephew, Arthur Nussbaum, son of the irksome Uncle Bernhard who had so annoyed Bertha in Bad Pyrmont, became a renowned expert in international law and eventually moved to New York to teach at Columbia University. Two other nephews, Wolfgang’s uncles Heinrich and Charles, served in a hussar regiment during World War I. Charles became a commissioned cavalry officer; a Jew could not have dreamed of such a thing a generation before. It was a short-lived dream, of course—and Wolfgang’s family would come to understand that intimately.

Wolfgang remembered his grandmother, Emilie, well. She was the last-born of her siblings, seventeen years younger than Julia. Neuhaus, the small town where she lived, lay only twenty minutes by streetcar from the city of Paderborn, where Wolfgang grew up, and he saw her often. At age six, he went to her home to recover from pneumonia and stayed for a full year, with Catholic nurses watching him around the clock. Emilie was nervous and domineering, Wolfgang said. He suspected that these traits were common to Schuster women, Julia included. “They had a little bit loose screw,” he said, twirling thick fingers at his temple. “My grandmother was not easy to get along with. I was supposed to love my grandmother but I never liked her that much.”

In her younger years, Wolfgang said, Emilie had been “extremely good-looking. Magnificent!” She was also very wealthy. Emilie’s husband, Louis Rosenthal, owned a six-story flour mill whose grinding wheels spun on the river Alme, which ran through the center of Neuhaus, a pretty town with winding streets of
Fachwerk
homes and a moated, white-baroque castle fortress. The family’s home, on the main road leading into the village, was a mansion in the art nouveau
Jugendstil
manner, with a tremendous yard, a tennis court, rosebushes, hazelnuts. Emilie donated generously to the local church and gave dresses to the town’s young girls for their Catholic confirmations. “They called her the Angel of Neuhaus,” Wolfgang told me.

Louis died of a heart attack in 1912 while swimming in the North Sea, leaving Emilie to raise their teenage children alone—three boys, three girls. She hired a manager to help her run the mills, and ran them ably until 1933, when she was seventy-two and the Nazis came to power. First they took the mills. Next, her home. Then she was told to pack a bag. She packed carefully: tailored dresses, starched undergarments. “And they marched her down the street in Paderborn, this old woman,” Wolfgang said, “and they put her on a train, and took her out of town.”

I had always assumed that my family had lost relatives to the Holocaust—distant ones. But I had never known names. Now I did. Wolfgang gave me a detailed Schuster family tree. Below the names of those who had perished, someone had typed, “Died in concentr. camp.” Most of Julia’s siblings had been lucky enough to be born too early; they didn’t live long enough to die in a “concentr. camp.” Emilie did, however.

Wolfgang escaped such a fate, and my family in New Mexico is one reason why. Wolfgang was thirteen in 1932 when the Nazis won huge gains in the German parliament; his father said not to worry, it was just politics. “My father was more German than the pope was Catholic,” Wolfgang said. Wolfgang hadn’t thought of himself as particularly Jewish until the Nazis took over. Then friends were arrested and taken away, and he grew afraid to go to the local swimming pool for fear others would see that he was circumcised. “I hated that I was Jewish,” Wolfgang said. “You were like an insect.” When a teacher entered his classroom after Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933, the students were required to say “Heil Hitler.” Wolfgang refused. The principal knew Wolfgang’s father, and told him to send the boy out of the country.

Wolfgang’s parents quickly enrolled him in a boarding school in England. And this is where Julia’s New Mexico family came in. When it became impossible to send money out of Germany to pay the tuition, Wolfgang’s parents asked Bertha’s husband, Max—Bertha had died a few years before—to pay Wolfgang’s tuition in England. Max did so willingly; he had already brought over or sponsored a number of German relatives now living as refugees in America. After a few months of supporting Wolfgang in England, Max offered to bring him to America to work—he was in the mercantile business, as Abraham had been. For Wolfgang, it was more than a rescue. He was a voracious reader of the German Western novels of Karl May, and New Mexico was the place of his
Cowboy und Indianer
dreams.

In 1936, at age sixteen, Wolfgang boarded a boat to New York. The journey was a grand adventure for him—he had no idea, as he steamed to America, what was in store for his relatives in Germany. He enjoyed the trip immensely. On the ship, he reigned as the boat’s Ping-Pong champion and “befriended a young lady.” In New York, he took in the sights, ate a banana split at an open-air ice cream stand, and went to Minsky’s to watch a burlesque show. Finally, he boarded a train across the plains to Albuquerque.

He arrived to bad news. Max had died only days earlier—a heart attack, at his desk. Max’s children—my grandfather and great-aunts Lizzie and Maxine—knew nothing about Max’s plans to hire Wolfgang. But they took him in gladly. Accustomed to wartime scarcity, Wolfgang was amazed by the “opulence” of his first breakfast: pastries, juice, grapefruit. The family set him to work, giving him no special dispensation except an occasional invitation to a family dinner, and paying him fifteen dollars every two weeks. To start, he packed piñon nuts to be sold in the East. On the bags he wrote, “Packed by Wolf, a Zuni Indian.”

Two years later, in the fall of 1938, Wolfgang’s mother, Anna, visited him in Albuquerque. She had been there only a short time when his father sent a telegram telling her to delay her return. Kristallnacht had intervened—the “night of broken glass,” of arrests and beatings, of burned and looted Jewish shops and homes and synagogues—and it was too dangerous for her to go back to Germany. Anna possessed only a visitor’s visa, however, and these were no longer the days when the Santa Fe Ring ruled the state; no number of pulled strings could change Anna’s documents. She couldn’t legally stay in Albuquerque.

But Mexico was not far away. So Anna moved to El Paso, where her uncle Bernhard—Emilie and Julia’s brother—had settled after leaving Santa Fe in the 1880s. She obtained an address across the Rio Grande in Juárez, Mexico, and each month she’d walk from Bernhard’s house in El Paso across the bridge to Mexico to renew her immigration request.