American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Emilie had lived almost fifty years longer than her sister Julia—who, in all her sadness, had been lucky enough in the end to die with a house to haunt. Emilie had prospered in life, but she had died amid unimaginable horror: the last of the sisters, the last of her generation.

  Her ashes are lost, intermingled with those of so many others who perished at Theresienstadt. There’s a small plaque with her name in the Jewish cemetery in Paderborn, next to the more substantial grave of her husband, Louis. TO DEPART IS THE FATE OF ALL PEOPLE, reads a tombstone not far from the family plot. We are all mortal, of course. But how we depart: it makes a difference to those who remain.

  Julia could not have imagined Emilie’s fate, even in her worst moments. Nor could Abraham, or Bertha, though it could so easily have been them or their descendants, had they remained in Germany. In all the pages of Bertha’s diary from 1891 and 1892, through all the spas, dances, family visits, sad moments with her mother, and encounters with “young gentlemen,” Bertha doesn’t mention once, not once, ever, the fact that she was Jewish. There is no discussion of synagogues, or Sabbaths, or anything that would suggest religious observance. The only holiday she mentions is Christmas. Being Jewish wasn’t something she seemed to dwell on. And yet fifty years later, Bertha’s aunt and cousins in Germany were nothing, nothing at all, but Jews. For that, they lost everything.

  There’s a bicycle trail that now connects Paderborn to Neuhaus, through the meadows Emilie once owned. It is named after her: “Emilie Rosenthal Way,” a manicured path of atonement that wanders along the river Alme. The river grasses shimmer green, and the water flashes jeweled glints of sun between the shadows of overhanging plane trees. On the spot where Paderborn’s Byzantine-revival synagogue stood before it burned on Kristallnacht, a plaque lists Emilie’s name and those of more than a hundred other lost Paderborn Jews. Below the names is a lamentation. It comes from an Old Testament dirge to the dead of fallen Jerusalem: “Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow, which is done unto me.”

  Two months after Emilie’s death, Heinrich was able to send a postcard to his sister relaying the sad news.

  Dear Hilda!

  Unfortunately I must send you the inexpressibly sad information that our dearly beloved mother died on January 1 after a short illness, after charging me with the warmest farewell greetings for you, which I hereby discharge. The memorial service took place on January 4. I miss the dear departed infinitely. My pain is like yours. I spent my birthday just as sadly as you will experience yours. I wish you, however, the best for your new year of life. I’ve received the contents of your little package. Warmest thanks.

  With sad greetings I remain your faithful brother,

  Heinrich

  Theresienstadt, March 4, 1943

  Heinrich was sent to Auschwitz on March 29, 1944. He died there, as did Arnold and Hilde—betrayed by Germany, failed by history. Of the one hundred and twenty-three Jews who were still in Paderborn in 1939, only five survived the Nazis. None survived in Lügde: its last Jews were sent in 1941 to Riga, Latvia, where they were shot.

  They haunt us still.

  Juli

  I MET JULI IN the library of the old house at La Posada. She was tall, thin, straight-haired, and blond, with small gold teardrop earrings—sensible looking. Juli ran a psychic institute in Santa Fe, and I’d asked her to meet me at Julia’s house.

  The library was stunning, filled with avant-garde Southwestern art, the floors a delicate inlaid parquet. We sat on a cushy couch near the fireplace, where the family had gathered on chilly evenings more than a hundred years before, and Juli told me what she saw: a woman with long, wavy, white hair, wearing an old-fashioned cotton nightgown. The woman wandered the upper floor: “The sense I get is that she’s looking for something, and the other sense I get is that she’s supposed to be entertaining people. It feels like it’s an anxiety for her, a pressure, and she doesn’t have it within her to be doing that,” Juli said.

  As I looked around Abraham’s elegant library, this made sense. The house itself—the grandness of its construction—was surely a player in Julia’s suffering. It was full, then as now, with people expecting Santa Fe’s finest treatment—Abraham’s railroad and poker friends then; gallery-goers and high-flying tourists waiting for spa treatments now. The house carried too many expectations.

  There was a sense of peace about Juli—a competence and restraint that made me want to believe her. She saw an image of Julia getting ready for an event, putting on her evening clothes, brushing her hair, getting ready, getting ready, but unable to go down the stairs. “I keep getting a sense of this overwhelming pressure that she felt,” Juli said.

  Juli sat calmly with her hands on her thighs, her eyes closed. “What I get is that she didn’t have a real strong constitution to begin with,” she said, and all the children, all the miscarriages, sapped her vitality even more. “I see her getting physically weaker with her births, and yet there were still all of these expectations on her.”

  Julia’s body grew weaker; her psyche grew weaker. The rope that connected her to the world grew more and more frayed. By the time Julia lost the baby, she was already “off,” Juli felt—“she wasn’t able to care much for another being.” Abraham couldn’t handle Julia’s sadness—he didn’t understand it. As she fell apart, he grew more absent. Julia felt abandoned. “The image I get is that she was really lonely here. I see this deep loneliness,” Juli said.

  The stories I was hearing, again and again, the speculations on Julia’s life and death—they did seem to cohere. There were elements that repeated themselves: Abraham was a solicitous husband but a difficult one, with his high expectations and extravagant standards. The loss of the baby was horrible, but only one of many blows that struck Julia down; she loved her children dearly but found herself unable to care for them. You can be in despair but not be insane. Perhaps these details came together this way because I had shaped them in the asking and the telling. Perhaps it was easy to make these assumptions about Julia’s life, because so many nineteenth-century women lost children and suffered from high-handed husbands. Or perhaps they were true.

  I asked Juli about the dreadful accident in Germany. Julia wouldn’t tell her, any more than Bertha would explain it in her diary. “She becomes very agitated,” Juli said. “She just becomes dark. My sense is that it’s something to do with her face just by how I see her looking right now. Something really big happened.” Now Julia deflected Juli—she didn’t want to discuss it. The fireplace hissed quietly. “I’m seeing her now, up in her bedroom,” Juli said, “brushing her hair. She’s being pressured to entertain guests, and she breaks. She comes down the stairs in her nightgown, looking very ragged.” I could see it, too. Julia, a ghost of herself already, half in the world and half out, swaying unsteadily on the stairs that ran beside the room in which we sat.

  “She comes down and thinks she’s hosting all these people,” Juli said. “It’s funny, it’s that connection with this being a public place that keeps her here, in a sense—that this is her job to be the hostess. I keep seeing her walk down a staircase—she keeps thinking she’s showing up, dressed beautifully. She doesn’t realize she’s dead.”

  twenty-five

  HER LONG REST

  Julia.

  Family collection.

  After her accident, Julia remained in Hanover. In January 1893, almost a year later, she was, reported the New Mexican, still unwell: “In case Mrs. A. Staab is able to travel she and her daughters, now in Europe, will leave there about April next and summer in Santa Fe.” She didn’t leave April next, however. In May, the paper found Julia still in Hanover, “and the latest news is that she is steadily, if slowly, improving.” In July, Abraham went to fetch her. They departed from Bremen in mid-September on the steamer Havel. Abraham and Julia traveled directly from New York, arriving in Santa Fe on October 6. Bertha detoured to visit the Chicago World’s Fair on her way home—th
e fair at which the historian Frederick Jackson Turner would take the podium to declare the West officially settled, the frontier formally closed.

  Julia’s own borders closed in on her that year as well. She disappeared from the public eye. I suspect this was a relief for her, not having to try anymore. She stayed in her room now, locked away, the curtains on her four arched windows drawn against the sunlight and the world. Not once, after Julia returned, did “Mr. and Mrs. A. Staab” appear on the society pages. Now it was “Mr. A. Staab and Ms. Staab”—Bertha, who assumed the role of Abraham’s official hostess.

  Bertha was the last of the maiden Staabs left; Delia had become engaged to an Albuquerque wool merchant—another German Jew—soon after they returned from Germany. They married in November 1894. “The Interesting and Beautiful Ceremony Which Last Night United in Marriage Mr. Louis Baer and Miss Delia Staab,” read the headline in the New Mexican, which reported it as “one of the most brilliant social events that ever occurred in this city.” The territory’s chief justice presided over the ceremony, held, as Anna’s 1889 wedding had been, in “the handsome Staab residence of Palace Avenue,” decorated with heliotropes, chrysanthemums, white roses—“flowers and vines throughout.” Delia “a vision of loveliness,” came into the parlor “leaning upon the arm of her father, Mr. A. Staab.” The groom, however, was “attended by Mrs. B. P. Schuster, of Albuquerque”—a cousin-in-law—“who took the place of the bride’s mother in her absence on account of illness.” Julia stayed in her room. I imagine her as Juli described her: at the top of the stairs, half-dressed and unkempt, close to family below but no longer in their world.

  Abraham, of course, hadn’t retreated from the world one bit. In the months after Julia’s return, he fought to keep the territorial capital in Santa Fe, fending off an effort to move the territory’s political center of gravity to Albuquerque, which had by then become the region’s economic center. The battle was ugly; Abraham’s character and economic motives were frequently maligned. In February 1895 he holed up in the capitol with Catron and a group of like-minded legislators flanked by fifty armed guards; Abraham personally guaranteed the funding to rebuild the capitol building and a nearby penitentiary, and to arrange a second railroad spur directly to the capitol from the train station in Lamy, outside town. When the vote fell in Santa Fe’s favor, Abraham was exultant. “For once,” reported the New Mexican, “Mr. Staab lost all his dignity today . . .” In his honor, the city named the narrow road to the railroad depot “Staab Street.” It is short—only two blocks—but it lies at the city’s heart. Catron Street, which runs parallel to it, is much longer. But I get the sense that Abraham never minded public eclipse, so long as his private concerns were satisfied. He continued to serve on the Santa Fe Board of Trade, representing the city’s interests in Washington, New York, and elsewhere.

  So it happened that he was gone, representing the Board of Trade in New York, on the night Julia died. It was May 14, 1896, late in the evening. Springtime: the desert was etched in pale yellows and pinks, like a woodcut. “Death of Mrs. A. Staab,” read the New Mexican headline the next day. “The Wife of the Well Known Santa Fe Merchant Called to Her Long Rest Last Night.” She “died quite suddenly at 10:30 last night,” the newspaper said, “after a protracted illness extending over a period of five years.” Anna, the oldest daughter, took over the prayer book, inscribing the details of Julia’s passing. It was a Thursday: “Donnerstag,” she wrote. I wonder if Julia’s death wasn’t, by the end, a relief.

  I could find no explanation of the particulars of Julia’s death. The newspapers offered no specific details. Nor were there official death certificates at the time. Dr. Harroun’s notebooks offered no information; Bertha’s diary had petered out three years before. Grasping for any insight—any imaginative flesh to plump up the unsatisfying factual bones of the story of Julia’s last days—I’d asked the psychics for details. Ed Conklin had said heart disease was involved. Lynne believed it had happened in the bathtub. Juli had thought it was an overdose of medicine, an unintentional poisoning. Misha, the phone tarot-card reader, didn’t give a specific cause, but assured me that it wasn’t suicide. Sarina had wondered whether Julia might have suffered from a sexually transmitted disease, but she believed that the immediate cause of death was associated with a lack of air. “She went like this,” Sarina had told me, grabbing her neck, as if gasping.

  I imagined Julia, her white hair unleashed and wild, wraithlike in her nightdress, downing too much laudanum and climbing into the bath, her heart clogged and slowing, sinking into the tub—her beloved porcelain bathtub, toted across the prairie—sinking below, gasping for breath, water filling her lungs, fear and relief and regret mingling in those last moments as she sank below, too enervated to rise to the surface.

  Whatever happened to her in the end, the death was news in Santa Fe. A lengthy story in the New Mexican recounted what we know: born in Lügde, one of twelve; maiden name, Schuster; seven children left behind; gone too young at fifty-two. “She was a woman of many noble characteristics, a devoted wife and a true mother. Telegrams were last night sent far and wide announcing the sad news.” The first of those telegrams went to Abraham in New York, “informed by wire of the sudden and unexpected death.”

  We can lay one rumor, then, to rest: Julia did not die by Abraham’s hand, as some versions of her story have suggested. A sudden death, after a long decline, and Abraham more than half a continent away.

  Despite the Jewish requirement that bodies be buried no more than a day after death, the family delayed the funeral for five days so that Abraham and the youngest boys, Teddy and Julius, both in school at Harvard, could come back to attend the services. They took the first train home. “The body has been embalmed by Undertaker Gable and is at the family homestead under the watchful care of the sorrowing relatives and friends. A fine casket has been ordered from the east and will arrive here to-morrow night,” said the New Mexican.

  Stores closed throughout town for the funeral, which, like many of the important events in Julia’s life, took place at the house on Palace Avenue. “The ceremonies,” reported the newspaper, “were of the most impressive character.” A family friend read the Jewish burial service “with grave and stately mien.” A hymn was “sweetly sung” by four Irishwomen. “Rare floral tributes” covered the casket, which was removed to a horse-drawn hearse and then to Fairview Cemetery—the new, nondenominational graveyard on Santa Fe’s outskirts. Abraham had helped fund it so that there would be a suitable place in the city for non-Catholics to be buried. Here Julia was lowered into the red, gritty, still-unfamiliar New Mexico dust, and Kaddish was recited, the men facing east, to the mountains, to the plains beyond, to the sea, to Germany and Jerusalem. Julia was consigned, once and at last, to the earth, and to the past.

  And then life continued, as it does. Teddy and Julius returned to Harvard to finish their exams—Teddy graduated in June. Anna and Delia returned to their husbands and families in Albuquerque. Abraham presented Julia’s last will and testament; the newspapers mentioned no surprises. Six weeks after the service, he and Bertha—his last unmarried daughter—left for Germany. They spent the summer in Carlsbad, returning only in October. On his return, Abraham visited his married daughters in Albuquerque. He sued a few people—mourning did not, apparently, restrain his litigious disposition. He was likewise sued: by customers, landowners, poker buddies. He traveled to Washington (“Hon. A. Staab, the merchant prince of Santa Fe . . . boarded the train . . . for the Capital City”), hoping to convince Congress to pass a bill that would fund his outstanding militia warrants—he hadn’t given up on the militia warrants; he wouldn’t do that. He went about the business of being a merchant prince.

  In 1901, Abraham was included in the New York Herald’s annual list of millionaires—one of only four in New Mexico. In 1903 he appeared in the Herald again—this time, the newspaper listed his occupation as “retired.” He had sold the dry goods business to two local merchants. With the
army gone from Fort Marcy and the railroad bypassing Santa Fe, the territory’s large wholesale companies were all now based in Albuquerque; its population now surpassed Santa Fe’s for the first time.

  Santa Fe was losing people, in fact—its population dropped by more than a thousand between 1880 and 1910. Abraham’s had been the last big mercantile house in the city, but he was nothing if not a savvy capitalist, and he understood that the dry goods trade was a dying business model—as the frontier had receded, so had the need for his goods. So he had diversified over the years: bought hotels, saloons; expanded his real estate interests; invested in railroads, gasworks, mines, cattle, irrigation projects. When he “retired,” he held on to his newer interests.

  It was Abraham who now pulled the family together—and I suspect that this had probably been the case for some time. His children had always revolved around him, like planets. When I’d interviewed Betty Mae, she had told me that it was Abraham who had decided all of his sons’ careers; this wasn’t at all unusual in that era. Paul, the oldest son, was in no condition to work, so Abraham picked Arthur to help run the business. Julius became a lawyer—he practiced in Albuquerque, overseeing many of his father’s legal concerns; Teddy’s designated profession was medicine—he stayed east as a pediatrician in Philadelphia.

  After Julia died, only two children remained home with Abraham: Paul and Bertha, who served as her father’s hostess and accountant—part dutiful daughter, part serf. “Grandfather ruled over her with an iron fist,” Aunt Lizzie wrote of her mother. Whatever inadequacies Bertha professed to her diary, she had never suffered from a lack of suitors: she was engaged three times, Lizzie said, but Abraham broke up each affair. If Bertha ever reunited with the man she pined for while traveling in California, she left no record of it. Lizzie reported that at one point Abraham tried to force Bertha to marry a man whom everyone in the family “disliked thoroughly.” Bertha disliked him, too; she fled to a friend’s house to hide out for three days when he came to town. I found a newspaper announcement of Bertha’s engagement, in 1902, to a Peoria, Illinois, man named Adolph Woolner; I suspect it was Woolner whom Abraham had foisted upon her. Finally, a brother-in-law intervened with Abraham to break off the engagement.