American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (30 page)

The Staab plot at Fairview Cemetery.

Courtesy of the author.

W
hen I was in Prague, I visited the old Jewish cemetery—a teeming jumble of waferlike stones pressed together in a walled-in courtyard. It was an astonishing sight: twelve layers of graves, fallen into each other as the earth heaved and sank, each generation more deeply buried by the settling of earth and history. There were so many souls there, their stones worn to anonymity, their names forgotten.

Yet we remember Julia. She was no monarch or saint or martyr. She left behind no art or letters, only children and a legend—and perhaps a spirit—that keep her from slipping underground for good. Her story persists, changing with each generation, each summoning, each novel, each website, each whispered exchange in the hallway. It changes with each teller.

Now it’s mine to tell.

Julia Staab sailed from Germany to a life that didn’t suit her. Her health, physical and mental, was fragile. Life’s gusts tossed her around. She missed her home and the life she would have had in Germany among her sisters—she had no way of knowing how that land would one day turn on them. She found motherhood to be taxing, each child taking a part of her until there was little of her left. She lost her last baby—the child of the darkness. But the darkness was not in the baby, but in herself.

Julia had few sources of relief available to her: no community of sisters, no cognitive-behavioral therapists, no serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The husband who chose her may not have understood her, though I believe he tried. Perhaps he was a despot—he was certainly no angel—but if so, he was a despot of his era; no better or worse. He wanted to help Julia, but he couldn’t. And so she faded slowly into herself, and away from her family and the world. She failed—mentally, physically, both—and she died, in her chamber, in her bathtub perhaps?

Suicide or no, the cause was the same: she could no longer abide living. Her sadness followed her from Germany to New Mexico and back, impervious to geography and companionship. Whether she was a victim of her times, or her husband, or her circumstances, or her religion, she was also, in the end, a victim of her own constitution. If her soul was divided in death, as Sarina had explained during our reading, I realize now it was because she was never whole in life.

She wanted to die, and yet her ghost story has kept her alive. She
was invisible in all the years that she lived as flesh and blood—Mrs. A. Staab, an accessory first, and later, an invalid and recluse. She was rich by birth and marriage, but in her world, in her time, she was still barely there. Yet here she floats, buoyed by the tale of her adversity, while stronger souls have sunk into history. The philosopher Hannah Arendt once said that posthumous fame is the saddest sort. That is the bitter reward to which Julia has been consigned.

This is what I’ve come to understand about ghost stories: it’s not so much the ghost that keeps the dead alive to us as it is the story. Ghost stories make visible the forgotten, the repressed, and the discarded. A hundred and twenty years after Julia was “called to her long rest,” people still talk about her. They lead tours to her home and write books about her—this fragile woman on the rough frontier, far from her family of origin and trapped in a world not of her making. Abraham dragged her across the ocean and the desert. But in death, she is the one who exerts a pull. She has dragged me into the past and made me custodian of her story, tracing a ghost outline of her years on earth.

And I believe this particular story has something to teach us. Ghosts connect us both to memory and to the world we cannot fully know. It is an unseen world in which the questions are leading and the answers vague and often contradictory, taking us beyond the methods of research that I hold dear. But in attempting to visit that world, in asking the psychics the questions the archives couldn’t answer about motives and emotions and secrets, I became aware that those intuitive and emotional truths lie at the heart of most of the stories we tell ourselves. It is the truths between the facts that tell us who we are.

I once thought of Julia’s ghost as a joke and an anecdote. Now I consider it a gift. It has lured me into a world I would have never known. So of course I believe in ghosts. I believe in the power of the past. I believe that we can be haunted.

Julia has touched me, carrying a message about how we live and
what we treasure and what we leave behind. It was not, in the end, Julia’s ghost that taught me these things, but her life. Observing how the task of living wore on her, I see how the past can engulf us. We can absorb and become our losses, or we can accept them and try our hardest to face forward and go on living.

The evening after my first child was born, my parents and husband and I ate dinner on an outdoor balcony at the hospital. As we sat, the baby beside us in her bassinet, an owl flew onto the rail of the balcony. They say that owls are messengers from the other world. This one watched us in the gathering dusk, and we watched the owl and baby both, the air feathered with hope and memory, and we all felt the weight of the past—loved ones long gone, winging in to see the future arriving.

We came home, and one sunny afternoon a week or so after she was born—a perfect May afternoon when the sun streamed through the open windows and the air held our skin in equipoise, the penstemon fragrant and groping toward life—I felt the softness of my daughter’s cheeks and lips and realized that there, swaddled and held close, was life beyond my own. She carried me forward; I linked her to the past. We named her Delia—for my husband’s grandmother and also for Julia’s daughter. There are Julias and Teddys and now Delias in our family, names that stretch across the generations, because the past can illuminate the future, and perhaps the future can also mend the past.

I am at an age now at which death lurks more obviously and takes more readily. The worst things we fear, the things that haunt us at night, are certain to happen—those we love will die, the body will decline, and then we too will die. Life flees like a shadow; it slips by like a field mouse. However we live—weak or strong, rich or poor—we leave dust; words and objects; stories and documents; brick mansions and yellowed photographs and letters of light on a screen. Traces of genetic code found in ever more distant generations: a twisted double helix. But also, the earth under our feet, the mountains that hang above
us, clouds, rocks, eagles, vultures, scrub oak, piñon, apricots, burros, alleys, streets, fences, lightning, snow, sleep. We leave them behind. Julia was resilient in death. I prefer resilience in life.

After I checked out of La Posada, I stopped at the cemetery where Julia and Abraham are buried. It must have once been a pastoral spot on the edge of the city, the resting place of Santa Fe’s Anglo elite, but it had fallen on hard times. The once lush Kentucky bluegrass lawn was gone—the grass had died away when the cemetery’s board could no longer pay its water bill. Prairie dogs had found favorable territory here, digging networks of holes and tunnels that had begun to undermine many of the gravestones. When the graveyard was a going concern, I read, the indigent had been buried in winding sheets or cardboard coffins, which had later disintegrated. Burrowing animals had begun to bring up bones from below.

I found no bones the day I visited Julia’s grave; only earth so barren it could barely support weeds, the ground returned to desert, red-beige and prickly, the once grand American elms and lindens and horse chestnuts also bare—dead, I feared, for lack of water, though perhaps spring came later to this place of the dead than elsewhere. Outside the chain-link fence was a busy six-lane road crammed with rush-hour traffic, and an electrical substation, wires and superstructure, and a state building of the institutional sort—thick walls and few windows. There was also, incongruously, a preschool play-yard providing the only splash of color in the entire tableau, aside from a few fake flowers laid on a few newer graves.

I drove the perimeter of the graveyard looking for the Jewish section, which I assumed would be to the side or in the back, as it is in most cemeteries. I passed the ample mausoleum of Abraham’s crony Thomas Catron (b. 1840, d. 1921)—a volume of marble, Doric columns, intricate stonework, and sheer cubic mass taking up lots of real
estate, as Catron had in life. I circled around the edge looking for a telltale Star of David that might point me in the right direction, then cut through the center to look on the opposite side.

I was so focused on stars and Jewish last names that I almost passed the enormous, obelisk-like monument, which looked not much different from the one in the Santa Fe Plaza that celebrated the killing of “savage Indians.” It sat dead center, a Gothic “S” adorning the top and the word
STAAB
carved in simpler letters below. Of course Abraham’s plot wasn’t in the Jewish section. There wasn’t a Jewish section, because there weren’t enough Jews in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Santa Fe to have a section—and besides, Abraham was always in the middle of things; and Julia, too, by default.

So their plot was at the cemetery’s heart, their monument the tallest I could see—fifteen, twenty feet high—topped with what looked like an urn draped in cloth, and carved of pale gray granite. At the obelisk’s foot was a square of dirt surrounded by a low granite wall. It must once have contained flowers or the grass that had blanketed the rest of the cemetery, but now it sheltered dirt and weeds. Surrounding the obelisk were five smaller gravestones and a wrought-iron fence, the only one in the cemetery—enclosures had been outlawed in 1903 to place an emphasis on “uncluttered dignity without ostentation.” But Abraham made his own rules; the iron barrier set the family apart, as Abraham always had—by station, not religion. And there the family was, still gathered around Abraham, ordered and contained.

I yanked the wrought-iron gate and walked into the plot for a closer look. Carved in the marble curb at the monument’s foot were the words
FATHER
on the left and
MOTHER
on the right. This was how they wanted to be remembered in the end. On the tower itself were Abraham’s and Julia’s dates: set in stone, impervious to rumor or myth.
ABRAHAM STAAB
, read the a simple, blocky font,
FEB
, 1839–
JAN
, 1913. And below, in letters more delicate, dates closer together, 1844–1896:
JULIE STAAB
.
They spelled it the old German way, because even after thirty years in America, she was still German.

The older girls had been buried in other cities with their husbands; the sons were all here. To the left of the monument lay Paul’s grave, a granite rectangle that flared slightly at the top, adorned with the same Gothic “S” as the obelisk. A large tumbleweed had come to rest against the stone. Julius’s grave flanked the spire to the right, the same shape as Paul’s, matching granite. To Julius’s left lay Teddy, under a modest polished marker, flat to the ground and covered in coarse red dirt and fire ants. Arthur’s grave occupied a parallel spot on the left, the same black marble and pattern as Teddy’s. Hadn’t he been banished? Why wasn’t he buried with his wife, his own Julia, for whom he had given up so much? More questions, the answers available only to the dead.

To Teddy’s right, tucked away in the back corner, was the lost baby, Henriette. She had been given a small, sweet marker, white marble, a delicate squared-off arch. Its shape reminded me of Julia’s bedroom windows. It was of a soft stone, the day of her death too eroded to decipher.

I took a few photos, and when there was nothing left to study, I pulled the tumbleweed from Paul’s grave and threw it out into the dust beyond the fence. Henriette’s stone was almost entirely obscured by a lilac shrub—a pretty little bush, the only living thing. The world moves on. They were dust, these ancestors of mine, ghosts: an aggregation of stories and dates, of fuzzy recollections and rhetorical questions, of faded photos and crumbling documents. I brushed the ants and earth from Teddy’s stone so the sun could once again shine on his name—so it could be read.