American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (25 page)

Abraham died a very wealthy man.

Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 11040.

A
braham lived another seventeen years after Julia’s death. He remained vital into his seventies, traveling often to California, New York, and Germany. He never remarried. As his children drifted into adulthood, he was a “lonely man,” according to Amalia Sena Sánchez, who in an oral history remembered meeting him on a train platform when she was a girl at the turn of the twentieth century. “He used to go to the station just to talk to the people going through.”

In 1907, just after Bertha’s wedding, Abraham was injured in a train wreck on his way to Denver. He was, the newspapers reported, washing his hands in the “lavatory” of Santa Fe Train Number 1 when the second section smashed into the first and his car crumpled around him. He suffered abrasions on the head and face and had to be cut out of the train. He recovered well, and continued to make his annual summer trip to Europe, stopping at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver after his visit in 1910. “I’ve been pretty well over the continent this time,” he told the
Denver Post
, “and I have found no city that compares with Denver in point of cleanliness and evidences of prosperity and thrift.” Still a charmer, he was.

In late 1911, he bought the territory’s first “maharajah-suited automobile,” according to the
New Mexican
, a Pierce Arrow limousine—the model favored by Hollywood stars and royalty. Abraham had the vehicle shipped to him on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway along with a chauffeur and trained mechanic from the company’s headquarters in Buffalo. The car was red, twelve feet long, with glass windows, velvet curtains, and leather cushions—an exact reproduction of President Taft’s own limousine. “It is a beauty of the touring landau type, has six cylinders of 48 horse power, and cost $6,800,” the
New Mexican
effused. It was the largest car that had ever been seen in New Mexico. Abraham had a two-story garage built to hold it. He would, at first, allow it to be driven only between his house and office—a distance of three or four blocks—and only in second gear.

The next year, New Mexico won statehood at long last. It had taken sixty-two years. While other territories had entered the union within months, New Mexico and Arizona, with their large Spanish-speaking populations, were deemed unready, the territory’s bid for autonomy bogged down in the politics of race and the battle between the Santa Fe Ring—which supported statehood—and its political opponents. But in January 1912, after years of false starts, New Mexico became
the union’s forty-seventh state. The territory that Abraham had helped build—a once foreign land of Indians and Spanish and Mexicans, and later Anglo-Americans and German Jews—was finally and formally a part of the United States, its years as a territory paralleling Abraham’s own American journey.

Abraham was surely jubilant, but his celebrations were tempered now by discomfort. His health had begun to fail. He suffered from heart problems and from “uraemic trouble.” Teddy, working as a doctor in Philadelphia, closed his practice and moved back to Santa Fe to treat his father. When Abraham recovered, Teddy moved to New York to start a new practice, but he was called back to Santa Fe when Abraham again grew ill. In late 1912, Teddy and Abraham traveled to Pasadena, California. “I wish to escape the very cold weather at my time of life,” Abraham told his friends. “I guess a man can take a vacation in California.” This vacation, however, also included bladder surgery, from which he was expected to make a full recovery.

He didn’t. On January 4, 1913, three days after his surgery, Abraham suffered a heart attack and died. “Abraham Staab Is Claimed by Death in Hospital at Pasadena,” the
Albuquerque Journal
screamed on its front page, in inch-high letters. The news of his death spread across the Western newspapers—San Diego, Denver, Colorado Springs, Las Cruces. Abraham’s fortune was thought to be the largest in New Mexico, the papers noted, at more than a million dollars. “Richest Man Dies,” read the headline in the
Anaconda Standard
.

Teddy accompanied the body back home, passing through Albuquerque on Santa Fe Train Number 10. “Innumerable family connections are plunged into mourning,” wrote an Albuquerque society columnist, “and many social affairs are, as a result, indefinitely postponed.” The Ilfeld family “bal masqué” was crossed off the social calendar, as was another society dance. Abraham had, of course, left detailed directions for his funeral. “It was his wish,” said the
Journal
,
“that the funeral be held at Santa Fe and that the Jewish rites be observed.” A rabbi from Albuquerque’s Temple Albert presided. Abraham’s body was buried beside Julia’s, in the plot at Fairview Cemetery.

Two weeks later, the will was submitted to probate—and this time, there were surprises. Abraham left the bulk of his fortune to his children, with some “special bequests” and exceptions: $500 to the Sisters of Charity in Santa Fe, 10,000 German marks to Julia’s sister Sofie, who had cared for Julia during her difficult period in the late 1870s, and $5,000 to Abraham and Julia’s son Arthur. The rest of the estate went to their other six children; Arthur would receive nothing except the $5,000 stipulated—“and no more,” Abraham declared. Were Arthur to contest the will, he would not receive even that small bequest. Abraham had disinherited his son. To make the point clear, Abraham made it again: “I herewith again affirm that my son Arthur shall in no way participate in my estate under this will except to the extent of $5,000 as bequeathed to him.”

Perhaps Abraham wasn’t as despotic a husband and father as the ghost stories suggest—in Bertha’s diary, anyway, I observed genuine affection. But it was clear, from the will and from Aunt Lizzie’s observations, that there was also a fair amount of tyranny. Abraham brooked no rebellion. There had been major damage in this family: invalid mother, controlling father, prodigal son. The parents were both dead now, gone—but their memories still had the capacity to haunt.

Arthur had always been the family’s “black sheep,” according to Betty Mae. A bon vivant, fond of lawn tennis and football, parties and card games, he seemed to find duty and decorum more problematic than did his siblings. Family lore had it that Arthur had seduced the family’s red-haired Irish maid as a teenager, resulting in her banishment from the house. In 1893, he tangled in a bar fight that made the news.
“Joseph Josephs, the saloon man, became involved in a dispute with young Arthur Staab yesterday and the latter received a slap in the face from Josephs. In the police court this morning Josephs was fined $50 and costs,” reported the
New Mexican
.

Abraham was fond of parties and card games himself, of course, and he didn’t shy from a fight; he forgave all this. What he couldn’t forgive, it seemed, was the offense that Arthur committed in January 1904, when he traveled to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to marry a young woman from Georgia named Julia Nicholson. Arthur had met his Julia when she moved to Santa Fe to live with a sister after the death of her mother. She was Christian, but Arthur fell in love with her anyway. Her family didn’t seem bothered that she had married a German Jew; the Georgia newspapers carried news of the engagement and wedding. But the Santa Fe papers didn’t—I suspect Abraham saw to that. Perhaps the family wasn’t observant, but the girls all nonetheless married other German Jews. The day after the wedding, the
New Mexican
had only this to say: “Arthur Staab is travelling on a sight-seeing trip through Mexico.”

He returned to Santa Fe two months later, according to the
New Mexican
, staying with his wife not at the Staab mansion but “at the sanitarium.” Soon after, the couple moved to Oklahoma City, where a 1905 city directory finds them working at and living above the “Up-To-Date Steam Laundry.” They moved frequently while in Oklahoma—five times, at least, in the years between Arthur’s marriage and Abraham’s death—living now in rented rooms rather than three-story mansions.

When Abraham died, Arthur learned the news by telegram and rushed back to Santa Fe, arriving five minutes before the funeral services began. The next day, the family gathered for the reading of Abraham’s will. It was then that Arthur had learned he would inherit only the $5,000. He quickly contracted with an Albuquerque attorney to explore whether there was any loophole through which he could contest the will.

But before he could take action, he received another blow. He learned that his younger brother Julius had died. In May 1913, five months after Abraham’s death, Julius and Teddy had set sail for Europe, traveling to London, Berlin, and Freiburg. Julius then proceeded on his own to a sanitarium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, to recover from “stomach problems.” A week after checking in, he was found dead in his room.

The doctors contacted Teddy, who wired their sisters in Albuquerque, informing them that Julius had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. In fact, his death had been a more violent affair, though it would take time for the details to leak out. Julius’s death was not what rocked Arthur, however. It was what happened after.

When Julius’s will was read, Arthur learned that he had been left out again. Half of the estate went to Teddy, the other half to the sisters. Arthur was astonished and angered. He couldn’t understand how his brother could do such a thing. And he believed that Julia’s long shadow was to blame.

Julius had been the achiever of the family—Julia’s namesake, Abraham’s pride: commencement speaker at Swarthmore, then on to Harvard and Columbia Law School, a scholar and an athlete. He was a gymnast—excelling in the parallel bars and vault—and an accomplished heel-to-toe racewalker. “Although very short, and thus handicapped, he has made for himself an excellent record on the track,” reported the
Boston Herald
in 1894. He was also a coxswain on the college’s rowing team, and he excelled at that, too, according to his obituary in the
Harvard Report.

After Columbia, Julius practiced law in Chicago for two years, then moved to Albuquerque to set up his own practice. He lived at the Commercial Club, an ornate brownstone in the center of town
that contained offices, card parlors, a library, a bar, a ballroom, and on the third floor, bachelor suites where many of the city’s unmarried comers resided. Julius was a fixture on the social circuit: a voracious bridge competitor, dance partner, and tennis player. He helped found the Southwestern Tennis Association and brought the first marathon to New Mexico’s 1910 Territorial Fair. He performed in local shows. “Little Julius Staab was probably the favorite among the blackface artists,” the
Albuquerque Journal
said of an Elks minstrel show in which Julius performed. He was also a member of the city’s tongue-in-cheek “Men’s Fashion League.” “Among the instructive papers read at its gatherings was one on ‘How to Acquire the Pompadour,’ by ‘Doc’ Moran,” said the
Journal
; “another, ‘Should Short Men Wear Checked Suits,’ [was] read by Julius Staab . . .”

In his late thirties Julius still hadn’t married, though he gave the impression that he would like to. The paper reported on a 1911 wedding at which “Mr. Staab was mostly conspicuous for a huge white flower which adorned his buttonhole and was observed gazing wildly about for the prettiest girls . . .” For Christmas in 1912—just a few weeks before Abraham’s death, a few months before his own—he told the society pages that he wanted Santa Claus to bring him “a girl.”