American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (7 page)

In the New Mexico that Julia encountered in 1866, nobody seemed to care whether she and her husband were Jewish. The newspapers of the territory—most of them, anyway, and certainly the ones in Santa Fe—wrote kindly of the local Jews. This was sometimes because they were advertisers and investors, and sometimes because there simply weren’t enough Jews to seem threatening. New Mexico’s papers marked the Jewish holidays (“Many of the best residents are of the Jewish faith and they will thoroughly enjoy the holiday”), and noted with approval the plans for the Jews to build a synagogue in the booming town of Las Vegas, New Mexico, which lay seventy miles east of Santa Fe—“That is right, the more churches the better. Let all the sects be
represented.” Editorials in the Albuquerque and Santa Fe papers applauded efforts in Germany “to break down the last barrier separating Jews from Christians,” expressed dismay at the periodic anti-Jewish massacres in eastern Europe, and chastised any anti-Semitic screeds they came across—“that the Jews are a charitable race,” wrote the
New Mexican
, “is allowed even by those who have the strongest prejudice against them.”

Abraham cared that he was a Jew. Marrying within the faith appeared to be important to him: he went back for a Jewish wife, after all, as did Zadoc, and Ben Schuster, and the Spiegelbergs. But there were limits—hard limits—to these Jewish merchants’ piety. Their stores remained open on Saturdays, and though most of them closed for the High Holidays, not all did. The Jewish newspaper
Die Deborah
noted a few years after Julia’s arrival that only eight Jews showed up for Rosh Hashanah services in the local Germania Hall because the merchants wouldn’t let their employees take the time off. “The Almighty Dollar is closer to the Jews of Santa Fe than our holy religion,” it lamented. There was, in Santa Fe, no temple, no Hebrew school, no kashruth. Indeed, there seemed to be nothing particularly Jewish about Abraham’s life in Santa Fe except the history, and the wife, he brought from Europe. He didn’t need Israel; he had already found his promised land.

He was American now. His children would be, as well. I imagine that he wanted the same for his wife.

O
N THE
I
NTERNET
, I ran across a blog written by a relative I’d never met before—a third cousin named Robby. “My great-great-grandmother was a profoundly unhappy woman,” Robby wrote in a post. A few years before, he had exchanged emails with a writer named Joanna Hershon, who was researching a novel based on the Staabs. It had recently been released.

The book is called
The German Bride
, and it tells the story of Eva Frank, a wealthy German Jewish girl who falls into a relationship with an attractive, if morally unappealing, Gentile painter in Berlin. The affair ends in a horrible accident, and Eva’s grief propels her into the arms of a dapper, if morally unappealing, local boy gone west, Abraham Shein, who has made his fortune selling dry goods in Santa Fe and has returned to Germany to find a bride. Seeking to escape her sorrow and lured by promises of adventure and wealth in a place far away, Eva marries him, travels the wagon trail, and arrives in Santa Fe. It turns out, though, that Abraham isn’t the great success he has represented himself to be. Nor is he, as Hershon puts it, “the most fiscally conservative man in town.” Rather, he lives in an adobe hovel on Burro Alley, “scraping along in squalor amid large insects, peculiar cooking smells, and refuse from chamber pots.”

There isn’t even a bathtub in the house—Abraham Shein orders one for Eva, the first in Santa Fe—but there is nowhere to put it, so it gathers leaves and rainwater in the back courtyard. Later, Eva and Abraham conceive a child in that tub. In Joanna’s book, Abraham isn’t a kind man: he doesn’t allow Eva to keep kosher, and he has a gambling, boozing, and whoring problem.
He is deeply indebted to the madam across the street, and he measures his character by “the fact that he hadn’t ever come close to pawning his wife’s jewels.”

This is an imagined version of Julia’s world, her story transfigured by imagination, supposition, and history—through art. But Joanna’s interpretation of Julia’s life isn’t all that different from those stories handed to me by Misha the psychic and Lynne the genealogist. Abraham was a cad; Julia was his prey. She had hoped for love in America; instead she found treachery.

Was this how it had been between Abraham and Julia? Was there any love between them? Did they share anything besides a bed? In Julia’s day, marriage was a contract, arranged to deliver the basics necessary for survival and reproduction; it was not a celebration of passion and compatibility. Did Julia have any right, in her time and place, to expect such things?

I was not, of course, the only member of my family who speculated on these matters. Everyone was intrigued by Julia’s ghost story. The older generation joked about it without much conviction; we younger ones gossiped and plotted visits to her room.

We were all haunted, in one way or another, by the notion of Julia marooned in the desert, and many of us found in Julia a muse and a metaphor. My mother, a poet related to Julia not by blood but by marriage, composed a poem some years ago about her famous in-law. “This harsh land with its alien colors, flowers sheathed in spines, sky breeding clouds above the sword-encircled blossom . . .” A third cousin, Kay, wrote a children’s book titled
Jews of the Wild West
. In it, she explained that Julia was sad, because a child had died in a third-floor fire.

Now that I was searching, I stumbled across fellow Julia-chasers
without effort. Some were related to me; many weren’t. But each time, I was surprised to learn that others felt as connected to Julia as I did—that they, too, had made Julia’s story their own and embroidered it with their own preoccupations, as Joanna had in her novel.

In his blog, my distant cousin Robby remarked on the differences between Joanna’s novel and Julia’s real life, between the imagined Abraham and the one who lived in history. It was, he wrote, “like that
Star Trek
episode where they go to a parallel universe, and see what life would be like if all the crew members were violent and evil at heart.”

We create imaginative worlds, parallel universes that serve our needs—I did, when I was a yearning, frustrated twentysomething looking for villains. Lynne did, too, in imagining Abraham as a monstrous man not unlike her ex-husband. Joanna did in her novel. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Julia’s ghost story gained traction in the 1980s and ’90s, as American feminism began to contest more forcefully the notion of submission in marriage, redefining it as abuse. This was the era of madwomen in the attic and burning beds. And in the contemporary version of Julia’s story—her story as we modern women have told it—Julia was a victim. And Abraham was a villain.

I don’t know that anyone in my family believed Abraham to be a saint, but I got the sense that Robby felt Abraham might not be as bad as Joanna—and Lynne, and many of the ghost stories—made him out to be. If Abraham was domineering, or consumed in his work, or if he gambled and frequented bordellos or yelled at or ignored his wife, was he a villain, or simply a man of his time and place? Would Julia have thought her husband a monster and a scoundrel, or would this be how she expected husbands to behave? Is it fair to judge as villains these ordinary
men of an earlier era, simply because they played by rules we no longer honor?

There is the Abraham who raised a proud American family and helped build an American city, and the Abraham who served only himself; there is the Julia who lived in the world, and the ghost woman who lives on in our minds. One feeds the other, and sometimes they intersect.

Julia and Abraham Staab, early in their marriage.

Family collection.

I
have a photo of Julia and Abraham taken around the time she first arrived in Santa Fe. Abraham sits on a tassel-trimmed chair wearing a dark suit, while Julia stands behind him, leaning in slightly, her hand on his shoulder. Abraham looks straight at the camera, fearless, with a bare hint of a smile. Julia looks neither at him nor at the camera but somewhere between, perhaps at someone else in the room. She wears a full-skirted
satin dress embossed on the shoulders and collar, and her hair is coiled smoothly above her head; her eyes are a tad too close together for classic beauty. Her fingers on Abraham’s shoulder are relaxed. It appears to me as if there is some affection there. But in another photo taken around the same time, she sits by herself, wearing an even fuller skirt and a smart white kerchief around her neck. She looks warily—wearily—and frankly at the camera, as if accusing. She looks so very alone.

Julia’s first daughter, Anna—conceived soon after Julia moved into the adobe house in Santa Fe—was born in November 1866. Anna’s name is entered on the blank pages of a book still kept in my family—
Neues Israelitisches Gebetbuch für die Wochentage, Sabbathe und alle Feste zum Gebrauche
—The New Israelite Prayer Book for Weekdays, Sabbath, and All Holidays. The prayer book served as the equivalent of the family Bible for Julia, a repository of important family milestones, recorded in German. It had been published in Berlin in 1864, perhaps given to Julia upon her engagement to Abraham. On the overleaf there are six ruled lines in light pencil, the entries written in cautious fountain-pen calligraphy—Julia’s hand, I suspect.

The first line recorded Julia’s firstborn:
“Anna Staab, geboren am
[born on]
23 November 1866.”
Adela, nicknamed Delia, came next, in 1868. Bertha, my great-grandmother, was born in August 1870—the third girl in a row. This can’t have been an entirely welcome development. A succession of daughters, in the Old World or the New, was reason for consternation—where were the male heirs?

But at last, in 1872, came Paul, the first of Abraham’s sons. “Born,” the
New Mexican
reported on January 15 of that year.

On Sunday morning the wife of A. Staab, Esq., of this city, was safely delivered of a son. Mother and child, we are gratified to announce, are doing well, and the happy father is doing as well as
could be expected under the circumstances. We extend our congratulations to the parents, and particularly to the father, for we know it is just what he most desired. We trust that the child, though born in this time of violence and revolution, may be a perpetual source of joy to his parents.

I noticed that while Abraham is mentioned by his first initial, Julia appears only as his “wife”—and also that “what he most desired,” was clearly a son—daughters weren’t sufficient. I also wondered what “revolution” the paper referred to, and what violence—the usual dance hall stabbings, or the Indian Wars, or something else? The newspaper article didn’t tell me; I couldn’t know. There was one thing, however, that I knew, that the newspaper—and Abraham and Julia—could not have known: this son would not be the “perpetual source of joy” the newspaper anticipated. Paul suffered from severe epilepsy, and he required an attendant his whole life. He was, explained one family tree, “of unsound mind”; a woman who knew the Staabs as a child described him in an oral history as having been “retarded.” What sadness this must have brought Julia and Abraham when they came to understand his infirmity.

There wasn’t time to lament, however. The next boys arrived in breathless succession—a boy every year: Arthur in 1873; Julius in 1874, his name honoring his mother’s. The fourth and youngest son, Edward—Uncle Teddy, my family called him—came in 1875. The boys were given English names, nothing Hebrew about them, and all of them shared the same middle initial: “A.” I know from an old passport application I found online that Teddy’s middle name was Adolph, but I could never figure out what all the other A’s stood for. I wondered if Abraham had named them all after himself—and I also wondered if he later despaired that none of the boys seemed to take after him in any other way.

If there wasn’t perpetual joy, there was surely perpetual motion in Julia’s life in those early years. The newspapers’ social reports are quiet
on the subject of Julia in those years when her children were small—but it can’t have been quiet in her dirt home on Burro Alley. She had a houseful of young children, one birth and then the next, seven children in the first nine years of her marriage. Each one, I fear, took a small piece of her. By the time Teddy came, the names had outgrown the penciled lines in the prayer book—Teddy’s dangled off into the white below, the inked script of his name blacker and heavier, as if the writer of it was now unduly burdened.

Those three girls and four boys weren’t Julia’s only pregnancies, either. A historian named Floyd Fierman, a rabbi who wrote books about the pioneer Jews in the Southwest, mentioned fifteen pregnancies, total—eight full-term, seven miscarriages. This may have been standard for women of her day, in the age before widespread birth control and modern medicine, and Julia wasn’t without help in recovering from her confinements. The family had grown rich and richer yet: the Staab & Co. wagons kept coming along the trail, forty, fifty at a time, bringing the world to Santa Fe and supplying the federal troops who stayed on after the Civil War to fight the Indians at a series of forts in and around the city. The Staabs certainly had enough money now to pay for nannies and cooks, maids and wet nurses.

But the help wasn’t enough. Abraham’s money wasn’t enough. Julia was alone in a small adobe house, raising children among neighbors who spoke English and servants who spoke Spanish. Her German-speaking husband was gone all day, out at the store or visiting customers or wheeling and dealing around the territory. She was far from everyone and everything she knew well.

On a raw winter day just before New Year’s, on my way to the archives at the New Mexico History Museum, I stopped at La Posada. It was a quick trip, with no time for anything but a brief walk around the lobby. I circled
once through the bar—the old family sitting room. It was empty so early in the day, and it smelled vaguely of beer. In the hallway, I admired an intricate brass chandelier, then went to the foot of the stairs, where Julia’s ghost is seen so frequently. I rubbed my hand along the mahogany banister. Julia’s hands had once grasped that curved wood; her children’s had, too, grazing the top as they ran up and down the stairs. I felt the heft of the past, indifferent to my presence.

Then I headed off to the archives. I dodged snow piles pushed up against the curbs of the streets along the Plaza to reach a modern two-story adobe building. I climbed to a second-story archive room and began leafing through the library’s folder on the Staab family.

In it, I found a letter from a descendant of one of Julia’s younger sisters, Sofie Rosenthal, explaining why Abraham had left ten thousand German marks to her in his will. Until then, my suspicions about Julia’s depression during her early years in New Mexico were all based on hearsay and supposition. But the letter explained that Sofie had, during the 1870s, come all the way from Lügde to Santa Fe to help during the time when Julia was bearing child after child. Abraham had sent for her. Childbearing had worn on Julia, and she needed more comfort than hired help could provide; she needed family. So Abraham brought Sofie to help. The letter was the first concrete evidence I found of Julia’s distress.

Sofie traveled by train to somewhere near Trinidad, where the railroad then ended, and by stagecoach to Santa Fe. But she “only stayed a few years, as she felt so isolated in Santa Fe,” the letter said. Sofie wasn’t married yet; there was no reason she couldn’t return home to Germany to be among the people she knew and loved. Julia remained in the desert.