Bertha was thirty-seven when, in 1907, she married my great-grandfather Max Nordhaus—a German Jew from Paderborn who managed the dry goods business of his aging brother-in-law Charles Ilfeld in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and on whom Abraham and Bertha could finally agree. The wedding, held at the house, was a much smaller affair than either of her sisters’. “Elaborate and elegant, though quiet was the Nordhaus-Staab wedding Thursday evening,” reported the ever-faithful New Mexican. It was a civil ceremony, attended only by relatives and “very intimate friends.”
It would be the last wedding held in the mansion on Palace Avenue, the last big family celebration.
twenty-six
BEQUEST
Abraham died a very wealthy man.
Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 11040.
Abraham lived another seventeen years after Julia’s death. He remained vital into his seventies, traveling often to California, New York, and Germany. He never remarried. As his children drifted into adulthood, he was a “lonely man,” according to Amalia Sena Sánchez, who in an oral history remembered meeting him on a train platform when she was a girl at the turn of the twentieth century. “He used to go to the station just to talk to the people going through.”
In 1907, just after Bertha’s wedding, Abraham was injured in a train wreck on his way to Denver. He was, the newspapers reported, washing his hands in the “lavatory” of Santa Fe Train Number 1 when the second section smashed into the first and his car crumpled around him. He suffered abrasions on the head and face and had to be cut out of the train. He recovered well, and continued to make his annual summer trip to Europe, stopping at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver after his visit in 1910. “I’ve been pretty well over the continent this time,” he told the Denver Post, “and I have found no city that compares with Denver in point of cleanliness and evidences of prosperity and thrift.” Still a charmer, he was.
In late 1911, he bought the territory’s first “maharajah-suited automobile,” according to the New Mexican, a Pierce Arrow limousine—the model favored by Hollywood stars and royalty. Abraham had the vehicle shipped to him on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway along with a chauffeur and trained mechanic from the company’s headquarters in Buffalo. The car was red, twelve feet long, with glass windows, velvet curtains, and leather cushions—an exact reproduction of President Taft’s own limousine. “It is a beauty of the touring landau type, has six cylinders of 48 horse power, and cost $6,800,” the New Mexican effused. It was the largest car that had ever been seen in New Mexico. Abraham had a two-story garage built to hold it. He would, at first, allow it to be driven only between his house and office—a distance of three or four blocks—and only in second gear.
The next year, New Mexico won statehood at long last. It had taken sixty-two years. While other territories had entered the union within months, New Mexico and Arizona, with their large Spanish-speaking populations, were deemed unready, the territory’s bid for autonomy bogged down in the politics of race and the battle between the Santa Fe Ring—which supported statehood—and its political opponents. But in January 1912, after years of false starts, New Mexico became the union’s forty-seventh state. The territory that Abraham had helped build—a once foreign land of Indians and Spanish and Mexicans, and later Anglo-Americans and German Jews—was finally and formally a part of the United States, its years as a territory paralleling Abraham’s own American journey.
Abraham was surely jubilant, but his celebrations were tempered now by discomfort. His health had begun to fail. He suffered from heart problems and from “uraemic trouble.” Teddy, working as a doctor in Philadelphia, closed his practice and moved back to Santa Fe to treat his father. When Abraham recovered, Teddy moved to New York to start a new practice, but he was called back to Santa Fe when Abraham again grew ill. In late 1912, Teddy and Abraham traveled to Pasadena, California. “I wish to escape the very cold weather at my time of life,” Abraham told his friends. “I guess a man can take a vacation in California.” This vacation, however, also included bladder surgery, from which he was expected to make a full recovery.
He didn’t. On January 4, 1913, three days after his surgery, Abraham suffered a heart attack and died. “Abraham Staab Is Claimed by Death in Hospital at Pasadena,” the Albuquerque Journal screamed on its front page, in inch-high letters. The news of his death spread across the Western newspapers—San Diego, Denver, Colorado Springs, Las Cruces. Abraham’s fortune was thought to be the largest in New Mexico, the papers noted, at more than a million dollars. “Richest Man Dies,” read the headline in the Anaconda Standard.
Teddy accompanied the body back home, passing through Albuquerque on Santa Fe Train Number 10. “Innumerable family connections are plunged into mourning,” wrote an Albuquerque society columnist, “and many social affairs are, as a result, indefinitely postponed.” The Ilfeld family “bal masqué” was crossed off the social calendar, as was another society dance. Abraham had, of course, left detailed directions for his funeral. “It was his wish,” said the Journal, “that the funeral be held at Santa Fe and that the Jewish rites be observed.” A rabbi from Albuquerque’s Temple Albert presided. Abraham’s body was buried beside Julia’s, in the plot at Fairview Cemetery.
Two weeks later, the will was submitted to probate—and this time, there were surprises. Abraham left the bulk of his fortune to his children, with some “special bequests” and exceptions: $500 to the Sisters of Charity in Santa Fe, 10,000 German marks to Julia’s sister Sofie, who had cared for Julia during her difficult period in the late 1870s, and $5,000 to Abraham and Julia’s son Arthur. The rest of the estate went to their other six children; Arthur would receive nothing except the $5,000 stipulated—“and no more,” Abraham declared. Were Arthur to contest the will, he would not receive even that small bequest. Abraham had disinherited his son. To make the point clear, Abraham made it again: “I herewith again affirm that my son Arthur shall in no way participate in my estate under this will except to the extent of $5,000 as bequeathed to him.”
Perhaps Abraham wasn’t as despotic a husband and father as the ghost stories suggest—in Bertha’s diary, anyway, I observed genuine affection. But it was clear, from the will and from Aunt Lizzie’s observations, that there was also a fair amount of tyranny. Abraham brooked no rebellion. There had been major damage in this family: invalid mother, controlling father, prodigal son. The parents were both dead now, gone—but their memories still had the capacity to haunt.
Arthur had always been the family’s “black sheep,” according to Betty Mae. A bon vivant, fond of lawn tennis and football, parties and card games, he seemed to find duty and decorum more problematic than did his siblings. Family lore had it that Arthur had seduced the family’s red-haired Irish maid as a teenager, resulting in her banishment from the house. In 1893, he tangled in a bar fight that made the news. “Joseph Josephs, the saloon man, became involved in a dispute with young Arthur Staab yesterday and the latter received a slap in the face from Josephs. In the police court this morning Josephs was fined $50 and costs,” reported the New Mexican.
Abraham was fond of parties and card games himself, of course, and he didn’t shy from a fight; he forgave all this. What he couldn’t forgive, it seemed, was the offense that Arthur committed in January 1904, when he traveled to San Luis Potosi, Mexico, to marry a young woman from Georgia named Julia Nicholson. Arthur had met his Julia when she moved to Santa Fe to live with a sister after the death of her mother. She was Christian, but Arthur fell in love with her anyway. Her family didn’t seem bothered that she had married a German Jew; the Georgia newspapers carried news of the engagement and wedding. But the Santa Fe papers didn’t—I suspect Abraham saw to that. Perhaps the family wasn’t observant, but the girls all nonetheless married other German Jews. The day after the wedding, the New Mexican had only this to say: “Arthur Staab is travelling on a sight-seeing trip through Mexico.”
He returned to Santa Fe two months la
ter, according to the New Mexican, staying with his wife not at the Staab mansion but “at the sanitarium.” Soon after, the couple moved to Oklahoma City, where a 1905 city directory finds them working at and living above the “Up-To-Date Steam Laundry.” They moved frequently while in Oklahoma—five times, at least, in the years between Arthur’s marriage and Abraham’s death—living now in rented rooms rather than three-story mansions.
When Abraham died, Arthur learned the news by telegram and rushed back to Santa Fe, arriving five minutes before the funeral services began. The next day, the family gathered for the reading of Abraham’s will. It was then that Arthur had learned he would inherit only the $5,000. He quickly contracted with an Albuquerque attorney to explore whether there was any loophole through which he could contest the will.
But before he could take action, he received another blow. He learned that his younger brother Julius had died. In May 1913, five months after Abraham’s death, Julius and Teddy had set sail for Europe, traveling to London, Berlin, and Freiburg. Julius then proceeded on his own to a sanitarium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, to recover from “stomach problems.” A week after checking in, he was found dead in his room.
The doctors contacted Teddy, who wired their sisters in Albuquerque, informing them that Julius had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. In fact, his death had been a more violent affair, though it would take time for the details to leak out. Julius’s death was not what rocked Arthur, however. It was what happened after.
When Julius’s will was read, Arthur learned that he had been left out again. Half of the estate went to Teddy, the other half to the sisters. Arthur was astonished and angered. He couldn’t understand how his brother could do such a thing. And he believed that Julia’s long shadow was to blame.
Julius had been the achiever of the family—Julia’s namesake, Abraham’s pride: commencement speaker at Swarthmore, then on to Harvard and Columbia Law School, a scholar and an athlete. He was a gymnast—excelling in the parallel bars and vault—and an accomplished heel-to-toe racewalker. “Although very short, and thus handicapped, he has made for himself an excellent record on the track,” reported the Boston Herald in 1894. He was also a coxswain on the college’s rowing team, and he excelled at that, too, according to his obituary in the Harvard Report.
After Columbia, Julius practiced law in Chicago for two years, then moved to Albuquerque to set up his own practice. He lived at the Commercial Club, an ornate brownstone in the center of town that contained offices, card parlors, a library, a bar, a ballroom, and on the third floor, bachelor suites where many of the city’s unmarried comers resided. Julius was a fixture on the social circuit: a voracious bridge competitor, dance partner, and tennis player. He helped found the Southwestern Tennis Association and brought the first marathon to New Mexico’s 1910 Territorial Fair. He performed in local shows. “Little Julius Staab was probably the favorite among the blackface artists,” the Albuquerque Journal said of an Elks minstrel show in which Julius performed. He was also a member of the city’s tongue-in-cheek “Men’s Fashion League.” “Among the instructive papers read at its gatherings was one on ‘How to Acquire the Pompadour,’ by ‘Doc’ Moran,” said the Journal; “another, ‘Should Short Men Wear Checked Suits,’ [was] read by Julius Staab . . .”
In his late thirties Julius still hadn’t married, though he gave the impression that he would like to. The paper reported on a 1911 wedding at which “Mr. Staab was mostly conspicuous for a huge white flower which adorned his buttonhole and was observed gazing wildly about for the prettiest girls . . .” For Christmas in 1912—just a few weeks before Abraham’s death, a few months before his own—he told the society pages that he wanted Santa Claus to bring him “a girl.”
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.
twenty-seven
DIASPORA
Uncle Teddy.
Family collection.
The 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-hou
se:” “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.
American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest Page 23
