American Ghost Page 6

  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.

  six

  BOOK OF PRAYER

  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 youn
g 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.

  seven

  BRONCHO MANEUVERS

  Sister Blandina Segale.

  Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 67735.

  In early 1877, Abraham sought additional assistance for Julia. He was still concerned about his wife’s condition. He wasn’t able to send to Europe this time, so in place of a real sister, he decided to procure a Catholic one. In March 1877, Sister Blandina—the young nun whose diaries recounted her days at the end of the Santa Fe Trail—was asked by her superiors to look after Julia. “A lady, Mrs. Adolph Staab, and her children are here,” Blandina wrote in her diary. “I have been asked to entertain them after school hours. I am perfectly at home with the children, but I have no attraction for entertaining wealthy ladies. However, since it is given me as a duty, I’ll do it. Mrs. Staab really needs attention. She is in a depressed condition, and I must cheer her up.”

  For a few weeks, Blandina spent afternoons with Julia. She must have done an adequate job of improving Julia’s mood, because in late April, Abraham asked her to accompany Julia and the children to Germany. Julia planned to travel there to see her family.

  But Sister Blandina found even the suggestion an affront. “I believe he thinks money can do anything and he expects me to accept the offer,” she wrote. “When he was convinced that I could not go to Europe, he said he would be satisfied if I would accompany them to the city of New York. But I am satisfied to remain in Santa Fe.”

  Sister Blandina’s superiors, however, were not satisfied: at the end of May, she reported a compulsory change of heart. “Sister Augustine tells me that the most Rev. Archbishop Lamy”—the archbishop of Santa Fe—“wishes me to go with the Staab family to the terminus of the railroad.” The railroad was now five miles from Trinidad, the scruffy frontier town at the base of Raton Pass. It was a five-day, two-hundred-mile stagecoach ride from Santa Fe, much shorter than the seven hundred miles Julia had traveled on her first journey across the plains, but a difficult trip nonetheless. The plan was for Blandina and another young nun, Sister Augustine, to ride with Julia and two of her children; the others must have stayed behind in Santa Fe, or perhaps traveled ahead of them. The women would be accompanied in another stagecoach by Julia’s physician, Dr. Symington, Abraham, and “two gentlemen who are going to Chicago.” Men in one coach, women in another.

  It was a hazardous time on the trail. Billy the Kid was terrorizing Colorado and northern New Mexico with a gang of criminals, stealing horses, robbing stagecoaches, and raiding settlements, guns ablaze. (This was not the famous Billy the Kid, but a less famous Colorado outlaw who preceded him—also young, also named William, also rampaging in the late 1870s.) “Everyone is concerned about our going,” Blandina wrote. “Mr. Staab spoke to Sister and myself about the danger of travel (at the present time) on the Santa Fe Trail, owing to Billy the Kid’s gang. He told us that the gang is attacking every mail coach and private conveyance.” Abraham wanted to make sure that Blandina was comfortable with the prospect of a run-in with the region’s most notorious outlaw. “‘We will have many freight wagons well manned, but if you fear to travel, we shall defer the trip,’” he told her.

  Blandina found Abraham’s chivalry touching, but she told him that she had “very little fear of Billy’s gang.” This was not only because of her abiding faith in God, but also because she knew—though she didn’t explain this to Abraham—that she could offer the family some protection: she was already acquainted with Billy the Kid.

  Only a few months before, in late 1876, she had been teaching at a church school in Trinidad when word came that Billy’s gang had been wreaking havoc on the other side of the mountains. One of Billy’s thugs had “painted red the town of Cimarron,” Blandina wrote, “mounting his stallion and holding two six-shooters aloft while shouting his commands, which everyone obeyed, not knowing when the trigger on either weapon would be lowered.” A few days later, the same gunman arrived in Trinidad. Sister Blandina watched him approach from her schoolyard. “The air here is very rarified,” she wrote, “and we are all eagle-eyed in this atmosphere.”

  We stood in our front yard, everyone trying to look indifferent, while Billy’s accomplice headed toward us. He was mounted on a spirited stallion of unusually large proportions, and was dressed as the Toreadores (Bull-Fighters) dress in old Mexico. Cowboy’s sombrero, fantastically trimmed, red velvet knee breeches, green velvet short coat, long sharp spurs, gold and green saddle cover. A figure of six feet three, on a beautiful animal, made restless by a tight bit—you need not wonder, the rider drew attention.

  The thug passed on through the town, but a few weeks later a member of the local “Vigila
nt Club” had come to fetch Sister Blandina. “We have work on hand!” he told her. The same outlaw—Schneider was his name—was again in the vicinity. This time, however, he was doing no parading. He had been shot in the thigh after a quarrel with his partner, a man named Happy Jack. The two former compadres had been “eyeing and following each other for three days, eating at the same table, weapon in right hand, conveying food to their mouth with the left hand.” Finally, at dinner one night, there came a lull in which each man thought the other off guard. They fired simultaneously, and both were hit. Happy Jack was shot “through the breast” and killed. Schneider was grievously wounded, nursing his injuries in an unused adobe hut in Trinidad. “He has a very poor chance of living,” the man from the Vigilant Club told her.

  But Schneider lived for quite some time. Sister Blandina had vowed, as a Sister of Charity, to care for anyone in need—outlaws, despondent Jewish wives—and so she brought him food, water, castile soap, and linens, and she ministered to him for months. The two developed a friendship of a sort. He confessed his sins—they were many, including befriending and then murdering inexperienced travelers on the Santa Fe Trail, scalping an old man who had once shown him mercy, and shooting cows for their hides—but he did not repent. “What will my pals think of me?” Schneider told the Sister when she spoke of absolution. “Me, to show a yellow streak! I would rather go to the burning flames!”

  A few weeks later, Schneider’s pals, including Billy the Kid, showed up in town, planning to scalp four Trinidad physicians who had refused to extract the bullet from Schneider’s thigh. Sister Blandina met with them in Schneider’s sickroom. “The leader, Billy, has steel-blue eyes,” she wrote, “peach complexion, is young, one would take him to be seventeen—innocent-looking, save for the corners of his eyes, which tell a set purpose, good or bad.” She declared the rest of the gang, “all fine looking young men.” Billy announced that he wished to repay Sister Blandina for her work caring for Schneider. Blandina was six years younger than Julia, but she trafficked easily in the currency of the gritty frontier. “I answered, ‘Yes, there is a favor you can grant me.’”