Fierman’s article confounded me. The story of the archbishop had been handed down through my family as gospel; no one had imagined it was anything but real. But it was no truer, Rabbi Fierman suggested, than the ghost stories my family had always dismissed.
Still, everybody else believed the story of Abraham’s gift to be true. In 1967, Teddy, Abraham’s only living child (he was ninety-two at the time), received an award on his father’s behalf from the National Fellowship of Christians and Jews. The archbishop of Santa Fe, James Peter Davis, gave Uncle Teddy a scroll in tribute. If the story of Abraham’s gift was inaccurate, everyone was perfectly happy for it to be that way.
What tales can we believe? The submersive force of history—the sedimentary layers of narrative—seems to bury even the hardest facts, and only the physical clues jut above the surface: the hotel; the cathedral; the chiseled Hebrew letters; the apricot trees; and also DNA, those four letters that can peel open, tetragrammatically, our genetic past. These artifacts—a tantalizing few—are all we can trust. We see them, collect them, and try to grasp what they mean.
It’s not as if I expected my DNA results to support the hypothesis of my descent from the archbishop. No one besides Grandma Ginny—and my father, and myself, and a few conspiratorial cousins—had ever suggested there might be more to Julia’s friendship with Lamy than what was decorous. I loved the drama of the suggestion—hidden passions, forbidden love. I delighted in the idea that my heritage might be mixed up in Santa Fe’s own mélange of cultures and history, that I belonged to more than one tribe, and might be able to claim a famous French archbishop as my forebear.
But I didn’t believe that he was. And it was easy enough to disprove, anyway: If my DNA test confirmed that I was, in fact, three-quarters Jewish, then it would be clear that the archbishop couldn’t have been my great-great-grandfather. If I were descended from the archbishop, I would be only 68.75 percent Jewish.
When the results came in, I went to a web page where I opened up a bar graph with orange and blue bars representing my “Middle East (Jewish)” and “European” heritage. As I’d expected, the orange Jewish bar was the larger of the two. But it was not as large as it should have been. A second test confirmed: I was 68.75 percent Jewish—missing 6.25 percent, which is exactly the proportion of one’s genes that each great-great-grandparent bequeaths. The results from each test also suggested that I was part French.
French. Nobody had ever mentioned French ancestry. My mother, who had been tested already, was 100 percent Jewish. Thus the great-great-grandparent-sized deficit of Jewishness came from my father’s side—perhaps from a certain non-Jewish French archbishop.
Perhaps the French heritage came from other missing ancestors. There had always been conversions, affairs, rape, and intermarriage, even before the modern era. I could have tracked down more relatives from various branches of my father’s family, insisted they get swabbed, and compared their ethnicities with mine—but short of an exhumation, questions would remain.
Stories and reminiscences had provided no hard certainties about the cathedral and Abraham’s generosity. Nor could the tools of genetics shed any real light on Julia’s relationship with the archbishop. And even the supposedly objective documents of history—books, letters, artifacts—were beginning to confuse me. Online, I found a few of Abraham’s passport applications. In 1902, he swore, under oath, that he had arrived in the United States in May 1857. In 1906 he stated, also under oath, that he had arrived in 1856. Elsewhere he placed his arrival as 1854.
The more I dug, the less I knew.
Still, Julia and Abraham did live once. They slept and woke, touched and tasted. They were there in the past; their traces could be found in the archives. They existed. Every time I saw the Staab name in a newspaper, in a ship’s log, or in the index of an old book, a chill scuttled up my neck: the dead came alive for a moment.
It was Lynne, the genealogist who dreamed of Julia’s death in the bathtub, who helped me retrieve Julia’s brothers from those records: Bernhard and Benjamin Schuster, crossing the ocean, arriving in Santa Fe, living in the house on Burro Alley and working for Abraham. She tracked them from there to El Paso, where they opened their own dry goods business. They were well respected there: civic leaders, businessmen.
But Lynne also found a sadder story from Ben’s time in Santa Fe. He had, while living with Abraham and Julia in 1879, fathered a child with a local Hispanic woman, Damasia Chavez. Lynne found a great-great-great-granddaughter of Ben’s illegitimate daughter, Josefita, who told us that Ben had wanted to take Josefita to Europe with him. In the end, however, he hadn’t, and he had gone off instead to found his own business in El Paso.
Lynne was convinced that Julia was devastated by this. “I would imagine that having Ben around Julia was a comfort to her,” Lynne wrote me. “One of the classic behaviors I imagine for Abraham was that he wanted to control everyone (especially who his children married). . . . He would NOT want his sons and daughters to think bastard children would be tolerated. Ben may have been banished from the Staab household . . . maybe.”
Maybe.
I wasn’t sure that Abraham was quite the ogre that Lynne believed him to be, but the story made some sense. It is true that Ben didn’t marry Damasia, whatever the reasons. He moved to El Paso—in shame, perhaps?—the same year that the baby was born. Such things as an illegitimate child didn’t ruin a man, however, the way they did a woman. He still came to Santa Fe regularly—“Ben Schuster, of El Paso, hale, hearty, jovial and energetic, is in the city,” wrote the New Mexican after the baby’s birth. In 1883, he married a German Jewish woman, Sophia Berliner.
That was the year after Julia moved into her new mansion; the year before the archbishop’s nave was enclosed. The archbishop was in declining health, as he wrote in a letter to the bishop who would replace him. “Not only my memory, but also my other mental faculties have much declined,” he wrote; “the smallest serious effort, worries, cares, difficulties, exhaust me and make me ill.” Julia was pregnant then—perhaps with the ailing archbishop’s child, but more likely with Abraham’s.
In July of that year, eight years after her last successful pregnancy, she gave birth to a daughter. “Mr. Abraham Staab has a little heiress at his home,” the New Mexican reported on July 25. Julia was thirty-nine years old, and this was her final baby—the one who died and, according to the ghost stories, turned Julia’s hair white, the baby who might have been drowned in the bathtub and had so horrified the phone psychic Misha—the child of the darkness. They named her Henriette, after Julia’s mother.
Her life was woefully short. On August 9, 1883, the paper relayed the sad news. “Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Staab’s home was made glad only a few weeks ago by the coming of a new life and a new joy, a tiny girl babe. To-day He who gave it called it home to His ‘mansion in the skies not built with hands, eternal in the heavens,’ and sorrow reigns instead of joy. The infant daughter was but three weeks old. Its death occurred at 8 o’clock this morning and at 8 o’clock this afternoon its white robed form was laid away in the Masonic cemetery amid the tears and regrets of the sorrowing parents and their large circle of friends.”
In the prayer book, Julia wrote a new entry: “Henriette A. Staab geb am 22 Juli 1883, gestorben am 9th August 1883.” The writing is smudged and uneven, slightly off-kilter, contrasting starkly with the thick black letters listing Henriette’s brother Teddy just above. It is written in pencil, as if Henriette’s spirit passed through too quickly to warrant a pen and pot of ink. In some traditions, it is considered a blessing when a child dies before it can commit any sins, for then it is guaranteed a spot in heaven.
And it was at this point, the ghost stories explain, that Julia came unraveled.
Sarina
I DROVE NORTH FORTY-FIVE minutes from my home to visit a psychic named Sarina. She met me at the door of a squat one-story brick office building in the old square-built farming community where she lived. Sarina was in her forties an
d wore racing-striped sweatpants and a flowered T-shirt. Chaotic brown curls unfurled across her shoulders. After we introduced ourselves, she sat down in a low-slung gray tweed armchair against the wall. I chose a rocker across from her. I didn’t give her much information up front, only that I was looking for my great-great-grandmother, who was rumored to be a ghost.
Sarina looked into the middle ground off to her right. “I’m seeing her as older, in her sixties,” she said.
I explained that Julia had died at the age of fifty-two. “That’s interesting,” she told me. “She feels that she didn’t have the opportunity to complete things.”
The February sun angled through slatted shades onto Sarina’s face. She had come recommended by a friend, who had seen her many times and had great faith in Sarina’s ability. “I see her with this big hat,” she told me—a hat of the sort you’d wear in a play, or maybe to a play. “Did she appreciate or participate in the arts? She’s dressed up, really dressed up. OK—and flowers, there’s lots of flowers around her, I feel that she really loved flowers,” she said. “To your great-great-grandmother it feels like flowers were a big deal. And fragrances, I smell the fragrances of the flowers.”
Sarina smiled at the air off to her right. “She’s going back to her younger days,” she said. “The suitors were definitely plentiful. There were a lot of men who pursued her even though she was married.” Perhaps the archbishop? Sarina couldn’t say. But she did say that at some point Julia’s “social butterflying” stopped, and her world contracted. A man made it so—it may have been Abraham. “She was asked to become more of a home person at that point.”
Not that Abraham held her back, Julia told Sarina—except Sarina was feeling that he did, in fact, hold her back. How odd, I thought, to watch Sarina take issue with the air. But Misha and Lynne had said the same: Abraham stymied Julia. “She doesn’t want to blame her husband, she wants to make that very clear, but she does want you to know there was this other part of her.”
Sarina stopped and listened for a time. Julia had thrust an image into her mind in the same way someone might move to a new screen in a web conference, symbols floating in from the ether. “She’s saying, ‘One child,’—OK, then tell me about the one child. She said she lost a child.”
And here my skull and neck grew cold, because I hadn’t told her that Julia had lost a child.
Sarina had also lost a child. Her son was named JT, she told me, and he had died at age seven of the flu—not because he was immune-suppressed or otherwise unwell, but because horrible things just happen, sometimes, for no apparent reason. JT developed a fever, and five days later he was dead. She hadn’t known she had mediumistic skills until afterward, when JT came to her and said that this was her calling: to serve as a bridge between children who had died and the parents they left behind. JT became Sarina’s spirit guide. I remembered then that the friend who had recommended Sarina had, like Julia, lost an infant very soon after childbirth. Sarina specialized in bereaved mothers.
Sarina started to speak, then stopped herself. “I’m trying to put words in her mouth and she’s saying, ‘Don’t say that!’” She paused. “Obviously, that”—losing baby Henriette— “was a huge event, but that’s not when things shifted. Things shifted before that.”
I thought of Julia’s sister Sofie coming from Germany to help, and Julia’s trip with Blandina. Julia was already suffering. She was far from home and family, married to a man who wasn’t, perhaps, the easiest to love. And the physical and emotional demands of motherhood, the debilitating love and the mind-numbing tedium—they had, as Sarina saw it, already taken their toll.
Sarina looked for Abraham. “I’m still not seeing your great-great-grandfather, where is he in this?” She looked off into space again. “He’s distant. I feel him being very distant.” Julia showed Sarina two children: “I see a boy and a girl—she’s showing me two.” Sarina looked confused, and started conversing out loud again with the air to her right. Something had happened with a son, and Julia didn’t get to be there for it. “OK, so was it that son? No, it wasn’t that son. What do you want to tell me about these two?” The two kids, she said, were more like Julia’s parents as far as taking care of her; they were more functional than she was. Julia needed tending. And her children—Anna, Delia, Bertha, Paul, Arthur, Julius, Teddy—suffered for it.
I asked Sarina if Julia had ever been chained to a radiator. “She’s saying yes.” But Julia told Sarina that she wasn’t insane. “She knows that some people think that she went crazy, but she never lost her mind and she wants you to know that. Yeah, she shut down, but she always had her mind, and it’s important for her to say that.”
And why, I asked finally, is she a ghost? Sarina interrogated the air. Julia knew she was dead, Sarina said, and part of her had already left. But part of her stayed in the house, trying to correct something that had gone wrong. Julia couldn’t leave the house; she simply couldn’t. “I have never seen this before,” Sarina said, one portion of a soul leaving, and one staying.
Julia’s soul had fragmented, like her story. And I was beginning to wonder whether I’d be able to put it back together.
eleven
THE UPPER TEN
Bertha (right) and Delia Staab as teenagers.
Family collection.
The ghost version of Julia’s life goes like this: In 1883, the baby died, and Julia shut herself in her room—her elegant, long-dreamed-of, newly realized room. She suffered and grieved, and her hair went white, and she never left the house again. This is the story in the ghost books and on the Internet; it is the story I wrote when I was twenty-four and living in New York.
But as I delved further into the records, I saw another story. Sarina was right: it isn’t always one thing that undoes us. Life goes on after loss—even the loss of a child, as hard as that is for me to imagine. Julia had, in truth, been lucky in the health of her children. She still had six healthy children—seven including the disabled Paul—while many mothers of the era saw few infants grow to adulthood. Julia suffered immense sorrow, as grieving parents do. And she had suffered even before she lost the baby, from depression and a keen sense of displacement. But she didn’t come completely undone—not at that point, anyway. She remained in the world.
Henriette died in July. But as I pored over old newspapers, looking for signs of Julia’s further deterioration, I found that in fact, she seemed more active than she had been before. Her name began to appear more frequently in the newspapers. In early October, three months after Henriette’s death, Julia and her family traveled east. “A. Staab, Esq, accompanied by Mrs. Staab and his three charming daughters, Misses Anna, Adele and Bertha, have left for New York City,” reported the Santa Fe Review. “Mr. Staab will remain absent for about a month. Mrs. Staab will visit at the house of her brother-in-law”—Zadoc—“for several months”—to recover, perhaps?—“and the Misses Staab will commence a three-years-course at the seminary of Miss Froelich in New York City.”
The girls had previously been educated at the Convent of Loretto, established by nuns the archbishop had imported to Santa Fe. While Abraham’s Spiegelberg cousins established their own nonsectarian academy, Abraham and Julia preferred their daughters to be educated by nuns. The convent was a refined institution, with courses in such disciplines as reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, history, astronomy, “orthography” (spelling), natural philosophy, botany, and needlework. Classes were taught in French and Spanish “equally,” and designed to develop the girls’ “intellectual faculties” and train them in “the paths of virtue.” The students said prayers in chapel each morning; Abraham and Julia seemed not to mind. It was not inexpensive—three hundred dollars a year, with additional fees for piano, guitar, drawing, Italian painting, and making artificial flowers. “The girls of this academy consider themselves the upper ten,” Sister Blandina explained in her diary. “As far as money goes they are.”
As far as money goes, Julia’s children were in th
e upper one, the upper zero, the heavens-high Santa Fe ionosphere. There was no one in New Mexico much richer than Abraham, and it was expected that his children would have all the educational advantages of that echelon. The year before they left for school in New York, Julia acquired a governess for the girls. (“Wanted,” she advertised in the New York Herald, “A Governess To Go to New Mexico and take charge of three young ladies; must bring good references and be conversant with the English, German, and French languages, and capable to teach music.”) Julia stayed in New York to interview prospective candidates, keeping a room at the Rossmore Hotel, an ornate midtown establishment.
New York City was the heart of the nineteenth-century German Jewish diaspora—the Lehmans and the Goldmans, the Loebs and the Schiffs—Jews who had arrived, like Abraham, in the 1840s and 1850s and had peddled, traded, sold, and manufactured their way to dizzying wealth. It was the world to which Santa Fe’s Jews moved when they made their fortunes—most of them, though not Abraham and his family—and to which the rest aspired: “a world,” wrote Stephen Birmingham in his 1967 book Our Crowd, “of quietly ticking clocks, of the throb of private elevators, of slippered servants’ feet . . . of sofas covered in silver satin.” There were “heavily encrusted calling cards and invitations,” balls and charities, “little boys in dark blue suits and fresh white gloves,” girls in satin dresses, German governesses, English butlers, Irish maids, French chefs. Finger bowls were mandatory at the dinner table; rooms were littered with Dresden figurines and bronze cherubs and fringed lamps; damask, marble, pigeon’s-blood velvet, pianos draped in Spanish shawls. It was a world of private ballrooms and dinners for sixty, of a mass summer exodus to Adirondack camps and the New Jersey shore, and, every two years, “the ritual steamer-crossing to Europe.” Abraham’s brother Zadoc lived in that world. Though he was not as stratospherically rich as the Lehmans and the Loebs, he moved in their circles. The same rabbi from Temple Emanu-El on Fifth Avenue married his children; he joined the same clubs, attended galas at the same events: the Harmonie Club, the Purim Ball, the Hebrew Charity Fair.
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