American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (26 page)

He was active in local law and political circles as well, serving on the territory’s board of bar examiners and attending the territory’s Republican convention. He had, reported the
Albuquerque Journal
, “the real gift of oratory.” After statehood, he was elected Bernalillo County’s first probate judge. But he lasted only a year in the position. In the spring of 1913 he took a leave from his judgeship to travel to Europe with Teddy; in July he mailed his resignation to Bertha, who delivered it to the county clerk. “He gave no reason for his resignation,” wrote the paper. He simply said that he would be unable to return to Albuquerque in the immediate future.

A month later, on August 27, he was found dead at the age of thirty-nine.
“It is believed that the grief over his father’s death and close application to his duties as probate judge and his law practice, weakened Judge Staab’s constitution,” wrote the
Albuquerque Journal
. The body was cremated in Europe, the ashes shipped back to New Mexico. In late September, the rabbi who had conducted Abraham’s service did the same for Julius’s.

After Arthur learned that he had once again been disinherited, he filed a formal objection to the will, which Julius had written only a couple of months before he left for Europe. If it were overturned, Arthur would stand to inherit a one-seventh portion of the estate as a surviving sibling. All he had to do was convince a judge that Julius hadn’t been of sound mind when he wrote it—that Julius, like his mother before him, had been insane.

In June 1914, Arthur’s lawyer took testimony from the doctor who had treated Julius in Switzerland, a Dr. Ludwig Bingswanger, the manager of the sanitarium in which Julius had died. Dr. Bingswanger confirmed that Julius, when he died, had been under treatment for problems of mental health at an “institution for the treatment of nervous diseases.” Julius wasn’t being treated for stomach problems. Nor, Dr. Bingswanger testified, had Julius died of a hemorrhage in the brain.

No, he had been found in his room, alone, with a gunshot wound to his heart. Under his body, the nurses had found a “small-caliber revolver”—Julius’s own gun. It was then, after Dr. Bingswanger’s testimony was released to the newspapers, that the rest of New Mexico learned what Julius’s siblings by then surely already knew: Julius had shot himself.

Uncle Teddy.

Family collection.

T
he case went to trial in October 1914, and each day’s testimony was front-page news, offering the state’s newspaper readers—and me, tracing Julia’s tribulations through the next generation—a glimpse into the lives of a once charmed family. “Julius Staab a Good Player but Hard Loser in Bridge Game,” read the
Albuquerque Journal
’s headline after the first day of the trial. Friends of Julius’s admitted, under
questioning on the first day, that Julius often played bridge late into the night, and that he was “of an excitable and nervous temperament”—the question being whether he was so excitable as to be insane. “There were certain humorous tilts between counsel and the witnesses as to just how hard a loser a bridge player must be before being considered erratic or abnormal,” explained the paper. Arthur’s lawyer asked one witness if it were not true that Julius, while playing bridge, would “deliver a lecture almost every time a card was played.”

“He would when he was losing,” responded the witness.

Julius’s mind was, friends and colleagues testified, “sound, clear and vigorous”—but he was also very nervous. He at times “approached a condition of hypochondria,” and often complained of stomach troubles: “frequently after eating a hearty meal would show in his face the visible evidence of suffering.”

The second day’s testimony revolved around the goings-on at the Commercial Club, where Julius lived: “Dead Man’s Roommate Interesting Witness,” read the headline. That was Ernest Landolfi, Julius’s roommate for more than a year. Landolfi didn’t think that Julius was insane but admitted that he was “somewhat peculiar.” Arthur’s attorney asked Landolfi whether Julius “took baths with undue frequency.” Landolfi said that Julius always took a bath after a game of tennis, “but would not say whether he took a bath five or six times a day, as suggested by the attorney.” The attorney asked if Landolfi had ever told employees at the club that Julius “had wheels” or was “bug-house:” “Mr. Landolfi with an emphasis that amounted to vehemence denied that he had ever made such a comment.”

And on it went, Arthur’s lawyer attempting to prove that Julius had lost his mind; the family’s attorney asserting that he was just a little nervous. The book Julius had used in his work revising the state legal code was “literally covered with memoranda and citations of authorities”—evidence, Arthur’s attorney said, of deep mental disorder. McCline,
Abraham’s butler, testified that Julius once refused to come to dinner when called, and that Julius once mistook him “for another negro, named Bramlett. . . . ‘I knowed something wuz wrong,’” McCline testified, “‘’cause I’m a lot handsomer man than Mr. Bramlett.’”

Charles C. Catron, the son of Thomas, the Santa Fe Ring leader and US senator, also shared a long, convoluted tale about a 1911 trip to Roswell with Julius, who talked of nothing but his stomach trouble the entire trip. In the car on the way home, they’d broken out a flask of whiskey, then run into a snowbank. Catron had gotten out of the car to push them out. His feet had grown cold, and when he’d climbed back in the car and requested “a little solace in the way of a snifter,” he’d “found to his disgust that they had drank up all the medicine.” The
Albuquerque Journal
reported a “distinct trace of emotion in Mr. Catron’s voice as he related this occurrence.” It was not clear what bearing Catron’s story of a drunken car wreck might have had on Julius’s sanity, much less what happened after the wreck, when Catron decided to test Julius by ordering him a large steak after they returned to Roswell to repair the car. “Judge Staab, [Catron] said, continued to complain of his stomach, but ate the steak, nevertheless.” Proof of madness, perhaps—or maybe an unhealthy fondness for whiskey and steak.

Still there was, Arthur’s lawyer suggested, a general “taint of insanity” in the family that began with the parents and worked its way down into the children. “Staab Family Eccentricities Aired in Court,” read an October 23 headline. “A recital of the peculiarities and eccentricities of various members of the family occupied a good part of the time of the court yesterday.” The Staabs’ longtime family physician, W. S. Harroun, took the stand: the mental condition of Paul Staab, the oldest brother, was compromised by epilepsy, he said, brought on by an early bout of meningitis. He explained that Abraham, at the time of his death, was suffering from “paresis.” I looked this up: “partial inability to move,” according to my
Webster’s
dictionary; “a problem with
mental function due to damage to the brain from untreated syphilis,” according to an online medical dictionary. “Paresis,” uraemic trouble, miscarriages, meningitis, insanity—all these were consequences of syphilis, which wasn’t, until 1909, treatable with anything but doses of mercury—the side effects of which were often as bad as the disease itself. Perhaps Julia had suffered from syphilis, too.

Harroun testified last about Julia’s condition. She was, for some years prior to her death, “insane,” the
Journal
reported—our first firm diagnosis of Julia’s malady. Sadly, the paper—exercising perhaps the same Victorian restraint that Bertha had shown in her diary—omitted further discussion, saying only that Julia’s mental illness was “due to causes that he”—the doctor—“described.” Hoping to read in the trial records what exactly he described, I called and wrote and emailed to courthouse after archive after courthouse seeking the transcripts, only to conclude, after months of searching, that the records from the trial had been irrevocably lost, along with my opportunity to know the “causes” of Julia’s insanity. But here, at any rate, is what Arthur implied: that Julia’s sadness was a condition, a trait handed down in the family, like small stature or long ring fingers—her bequest. And that Julius, like his mother, battled demons.

The trial was, at the time, the longest civil case in Bernalillo County history. In the closing days, the arguments revolved around whether Arthur’s family had turned away from him because they were crazy or because he was dishonest. When Teddy testified, he denied that the family had been worried about Julius’s mental state, and described “with infinite pathos,” Julius’s final trip abroad, how they “had gone from one to another European resort in a vain endeavor to regain his health”—not all that different from Julia’s odyssey two decades earlier. “Throughout Dr. Staab’s narrative members of the jury leaned
forward in their seats to hear what he had to say,” reported the
Journal
, “while a hush pervaded the courtroom as the spectators breathlessly followed his story.” A family’s ghost and demons—its once hidden past—was now on display.

Teddy explained that Abraham had not disinherited Arthur because of his marriage to a Gentile—though Abraham was angry that Arthur hadn’t asked his permission, and Teddy “admitted having heard him say that marriages between people of the same religion were always the happiest.” Rather, Abraham cut Arthur out of the family, Teddy said, because Arthur had stolen from them. “My father trusted him implicitly in money matters and this trust was often abused. He took money from my father. He stole jewelry from my mother,” Teddy said.

Arthur, during his turn on the stand, insisted that any money he had taken had been promised to him to compensate for Julius’s and Teddy’s expensive Ivy League education—after only two years at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Arthur had been called home to work for Abraham. Abraham had given Arthur authority, he said, to spend up to $10,000 a year. But after Arthur’s marriage, Abraham and Julius had turned on him. They had invited Arthur to meet at the house of a family friend, searched him for a weapon, and accused him of stealing money and pawning Julia’s jewelry in El Paso. Arthur had signed a confession admitting the thefts, but he explained that he had signed it without reading it—only, he explained, because his wife was sick and he “did not want to cause her a shock.”

Abraham hated Arthur without reason, Arthur said. This German Jewish patriarch could not abide his too-American child, and he dangled his inheritance as the price of compliance. “The witness told a story . . . of hostility to him and favoritism to his brothers from his early youth—of fidelity to the interest of his father which was repaid by unkindness and bitterness.” Abraham had once threatened to disinherit Julius, too, until Arthur “pleaded long and earnestly with his
father to ‘give Julius another chance.’” Abraham’s displeasure had a fearsome price.

This was why, when Arthur decided to marry, he told Abraham only that he was “going south.” He knew his father would oppose marriage to a Gentile, Arthur said, because Abraham had “broken up a former love affair . . . on that account.” After the marriage, Arthur didn’t see his father again until a month after he and his new wife returned to Santa Fe. He was sitting with her on a bench on the Plaza as Abraham walked past. Abraham at first pretended he didn’t see them. “Hello, Papa,” Arthur called. But Abraham said he wanted “nothing to do with him,” and walked on.

Like Ishmael in the desert, Arthur was banished. He and Julia moved to Oklahoma City and opened a laundry. “Mrs. Staab, slender, graceful, and possessed of the soft voice that is typical of the high-bred southern woman”—testified about their tribulations in Oklahoma. Arthur’s savings had been lost in a Texas bank failure (though in his own testimony, he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the bank or the town in which it was located). At the laundry, they worked long hours, on Sundays, and at night, “and on some occasions until 5 o’clock in the morning to keep things going.” Julia had to pawn her rings to raise enough money to make payroll. She miscarried a pregnancy during that time. Abraham sent small remittances occasionally, though only to her. A year after they moved, Abraham visited, but he would speak only to Julia. He told her if she were ever in need she could always find a home with him in Santa Fe, but “on all occasions when Arthur’s name was mentioned, she said, his father spoke most bitterly of him, called him a fool, a thief and a liar . . . and told the witness that she was a fool to stick to him as she did.” By all accounts, Abraham was quite fond of young Julia. It was Arthur he couldn’t abide.