American Ghost Page 8

  Lamy scouted materials. He located a cache of ocherous limestone in the Arroyo Sais that ran through town. He came upon a light volcanic tufa, found in the vaults of the Cerro Mojino just outside Santa Fe. These materials, laboriously quarried and hauled and cut and laid stone by stone, would form the cathedral’s walls. A French architect and stonemason, Antoine Mouly, would direct the work.

  The cathedral’s granite cornerstone was laid in 1869, three years after Julia’s arrival. The stone had been carved out to enclose a time capsule that contained the names of the president (Ulysses S. Grant) and the territory’s governor, along with newspapers, documents, and coins of gold, silver, and copper. But the capsule disappeared a week later—stolen for the coins.

  Such was Lamy’s luck throughout the construction. The foundations were laid incorrectly, and they had to be torn up and started again. Funds ran abortively short, and Lamy’s grand architectural ambitions had to be scaled back. Mosaics and carved figures were jettisoned. The nave grew smaller, the tower shorter. The structure, built on an old grave site, kept settling until Mouly was forced to add a new and costly set of subordinate arches to its sides. Then Mouly went stone-blind from the dust. Construction ceased entirely between 1873 and 1878, even as Lamy was elevated, in 1875, to archbishop. He raffled off his horses and his carriage in hopes of bringing in more funds. He begged the wealthy families in the parish—the familias Sena, Contreras, and Perea—for more money.

  And finally, when their generosity was expended, he looked elsewhere—to the Protestants, and then to the Jews.

  As the archbishop struggled to complete his life’s work, Abraham contemplated his own building project.

  By the late 1870s, Julia and the children had returned from Germany. The children were at easier ages now, their characters defined. Bertha, my great-grandmother, was flirtatious; her older sister Delia was forceful, Arthur willful, Julius sweet; Teddy, the youngest, was impish and playful. Julia began to circulate in society more, attending parties and other gatherings.

  She had probably learned English by then, though the family still spoke German at home. Perhaps she learned Spanish as well, though she would have less need of it soon. The railroad was approaching, and more Anglo men and women were arriving each day. Some floated through, but others stayed. Santa Fe was now on the verge of joining the larger world. Brick by brick, railroad tie by railroad tie, Indian battle by Indian battle, it was being transformed from a foreign territory into an American outpost.

  In 1880, after many delays and much drama, the railroad finally arrived. Two years earlier, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had announced that the main transcontinental line would bypass Santa Fe—notwithstanding the “Santa Fe” in the company’s name—and pass through Albuquerque instead. The local business community was devastated, and a group led by Abraham and Archbishop Lamy campaigned to pass a bond issue to aid in the building of a spur from the main line to the city. On February 16, 1880, the first train puffed into Santa Fe. The Ninth Cavalry Band, part of a Buffalo Soldier regiment, led a flag-waving parade of soldiers, carriages, and students from the Plaza to the depot, where the territory’s governor, its chief justice, and Abraham drove in the silver spikes. President Rutherford B. Hayes paid the city a visit later that year, the first presidential visit to the territory. Abraham served on the welcoming committee, and his brother Zadoc, visiting from New York, rode in the president’s coach from the train station.

  The city was growing more civilized. In 1881, the first streetlight winked on, and a “new gasometer and conduit” was erected to light the Plaza and the nearby streets. The first telephone line arrived in New Mexico around the same time. There were now “fresh oysters daily” at Miller’s, according to ads in the New Mexican—mollusks, hauled far from the ocean. Abraham built a plank sidewalk in front of his stores so customers didn’t have to slog through dust and mud; other establishments did the same.

  Now that Santa Fe was an American city, it was time for Abraham to build a mansion befitting his American dreams. He would build it for himself, certainly—but also for Julia. It would be a proper European house; one that might, finally, make her feel at home. He had vowed, under the chuppah in Germany nearly twenty years before, that he would provide for her. Perhaps he couldn’t make her happy—perhaps there weren’t enough nuns or sisters available for that. But he could build her a home. In 1881 Abraham purchased six acres directly east of Lamy’s growing cathedral on Palace Avenue—a fittingly royal street name for this merchant prince’s palace. Then Abraham imported, first by steamer and wagon train and later by railroad, masses of pressed brick, marble, and mahogany. His associates at the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe lent him masons from Kansas City.

  The house rose. Abraham’s construction went far more smoothly than the archbishop’s. The New Mexican made regular reports on the home’s progress. “Mr. A. Staab is doing a good deal of building. Good for him!” it reported. “The mansard roof of the new residence of Mr. A. Staab is nearly completed,” came an update a few months later. In early 1882, a reporter took a tour. “S. B. Wheeler, the architect, showed the reporter through the splendid new residence of Mr. A. Staab. It is truly an elegant structure, doing credit to Santa Fe. . . . It is rapidly approaching completion.” The house featured brass chandeliers, inlaid wood flooring, fluted door and window frames, and steam heat. The lower floors were conceived as receiving areas—two parlors, one for family, one for guests; a library; and a conservatory.

  A mahogany staircase led to the second floor, which housed the bedrooms. Separate bedrooms for husband and wife were a luxury that Abraham and Julia could now afford. Abraham’s lay to the left of the grand staircase. Julia’s—the one I would visit a hundred and thirty years later—lay to the right, with its arched windows overlooking Palace Avenue. She would have her own bathroom, with a claw-foot porcelain tub. The children would sleep in the back rooms. In the third-floor ballroom, the Staabs would host elegant affairs—fetes and formal dances, no fandangos there. For contemplation of the vistas, Abraham topped the home with an elaborately decorated widow’s walk.

  It was a structure that taunted the land around it. Mastery! Triumph! Not for Abraham the becoming modesty of the native architecture. Not for him the blending of house and land. “The Hopi villages that were set upon rock mesas, were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance,” Willa Cather wrote fifty years later in Death Comes for the Archbishop. “None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural—even dangerous. . . . It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.” But Abraham wasn’t the sort to fear sleeping spirits.

  Furniture came from Europe and the East Coast. A piano traveled from Kansas City. A mezuzah was affixed to the doorframe. Workmen installed gilt floor-length mirrors. The newspaper saw fit to mention a “green sword,” perhaps a newly acquired family heirloom, that “now graces the residence of A. Staab.” On the grounds around the structure, gardens and a large orchard were planted. My grandfather, who was a child when the family sold the house, remembered that the apricot trees reached over a tall wrought-iron fence, and that the local children would shinny up to pick them.

  Archbishop Lamy helped Julia plant those apricot trees, which long outlived them both. In the gardens at La Posada, one tree still stands, the one my children climbed—three thick limbs, gnarled and dendritic, braiding over and through the adobe wall and roof of one of the casitas. A plaque leans into a particularly large and impressive knot near its base: “In the 1880’s,” it reads, “this apricot tree was planted by Julia Staab and her dear friend, Archbishop Lamy. They were avid gardeners and together planted all of the other large fruit trees on the grounds of La Posada de Santa Fe.”

  Abraham and the archbishop were fr
iends. They shared an interest in the civic improvement of Santa Fe, and they worked together to bring the railroad as well as the sidewalks and gaslights. They constructed monuments to their beliefs—a cathedral for one, a private mansion for the other—and strove, side by side, to impose a European sense of order on their adopted city. But it seems that there was a different kind of friendship between the archbishop and our displaced Jewish bride. It was a native sympathy, built on quieter tasks and more delicate sensibilities.

  This was the relationship that Lamy’s biographer Paul Horgan described in another book he wrote about the Southwest, The Centuries of Santa Fe, published in 1956. In one chapter of that book, he tells of the friendship between the archbishop and an unnamed German Jewish woman. The chapter is titled “The German Bride,” and its first page is illustrated with a drawing of a three-story Victorian home, surrounded by deciduous trees and a tall wrought-iron fence. It is the precise image of Abraham and Julia’s home.

  The German bride was, in Horgan’s depiction, an exquisite and dignified creature in a rugged outpost starved for urbanity. My family loved that bride, who seemed to have floated right out of a Western. “Her skin was white,” Horgan wrote. “Her clothes were beautifully made in the highest of fashion. She animated them with something of the effect of a small girl dressed up playing queen. She could make everybody smile simply on meeting them. Wait till she played the piano for them, and then she would make them sigh, or even weep. Her Mendelssohn—they would never believe it.”

  The German bride was a consummate hostess, as Julia might have been on her good days. Horgan describes elaborate formal affairs in the bride’s mansard-roofed home, and afternoon teas in the mansion’s yellow-silk drawing room, and dinners at a table set with “European china, cut glass, silver, lace, and linen.” There were visits from Rutherford Hayes; Generals Nelson Miles, Philip Sheridan, and William Tecumseh Sherman; and once, the “notorious philosopher Robert G. Ingersoll”—a famous agnostic.

  The bride entertained the archbishop on a regular basis. “She would find in him a friend,” Horgan wrote. The two seemed to understand each other, their “distinct sophistication” and European sensibilities. “She always enjoyed her little exchanges with the bishop . . . ,” Horgan explained.

  Her education was excellent, and she spoke a social kind of French, so that when they met she engaged the bishop in his own early language. He replied in kind, amused to speak the language in which he still realized much of his thought.

  Abraham had left Germany of his own accord, willingly, forcefully. Julia and the archbishop had arrived in Santa Fe under higher orders—Lamy’s from the church, Julia’s because of the husband she had sworn to obey. And the longing for home never left the archbishop or the German bride. They never quite adapted, in Horgan’s estimation, to the high seasoning of the food, or the high drama of the landscape and people around them. Lamy and Julia were both avid gardeners. Lamy, accustomed to the innumerable greens of the Limagne Plain where he had grown up—the yellow-green grasses, the silvered willows, the near-black hearts of the poplar stands—never grew to love the desert reds and buffs and taupes and tans. Julia, too, favored the gentler, more generous blooms of her childhood home.

  When Lamy first came to New Mexico, he carried cuttings from France, and each time he traveled to Europe, he brought back more—peaches, pears, oxheart cherry, fall and winter apple; seeds of cabbages, turnips, and beets; muscat and Malaga and Gamay and Catawba grapes hauled in buckets of water across the ocean and the plains. He planted them behind the parish church that would be replaced, eventually, by his new cathedral. The garden was his only personal indulgence—his only visible one, anyway. It was five acres, an adobe-walled garden with a fountain, a sundial, aisles of trees, formal walks, shaded benches, and a spring-fed pond with water lilies and trout. He brought shrubs and vines and shade trees with him, too, thousands of them, chestnuts and elms, locusts and osier willows, that he transplanted along the Plaza and the streets that radiated out to mountain and desert.

  Some of those cuttings also found their way into Julia’s garden. Transplanted themselves to an odd and barren land, Lamy and Julia performed their own acts of reclamation, irrigating those things that couldn’t survive without intervention, softening their new city’s stark splendor. Daguerreotypes from the 1850s show a dusty stretch of plaza, bereft of vegetation. But by the 1880s, there was bountiful shade from the trees Lamy had imported. This desert did not grow green on its own; it required nourishment. In Lamy’s hands, even the most delicate varieties flourished.

  Nor was gardening the only affinity between the archbishop and the German bride. There was the love of European architecture, the conversational French. They were also both often unwell. Julia’s mental and physical health was tenuous, as we know; the archbishop, too, was “always ill,” according to Horgan. He was bled twice, Horgan reported, and treated fifteen times with leeches on the abdomen. His mental state also seemed incongruously fragile “within his square peasant frame,” Horgan wrote. Lamy was nervous; there was a darkness within him. He had a tendency to collapse into himself and withdraw from the world. Of course, Julia did as well.

  There was a kinship between the archbishop and Julia—a connection.

  nine

  OTHER SPECULATIONS

  Grandma Ginny.

  Family collection, 1937.

  My grandmother Ginny was once a new bride in New Mexico, too, and she also speculated on the relationship between Julia and Archbishop Lamy. Ginny was my sole non-Jewish grandparent—a Westchester County WASP who met my grandfather at a Yale football game in the days of raccoon coats. After they married in 1935, he drove her to her new home in New Mexico. In an essay she wrote called “The New Bride,” she compared Julia’s experience as an imported wife with her own. In the essay, she describes her arrival in Albuquerque for the first time, and feeling violently out of place in that desiccated land. The road signs on Route 66 had advertised “the promised land for 500 barren miles,” Ginny wrote, “and sign by sign I envisioned a beautiful oasis on the banks of the fabled Rio Grande.”

  But then the pavement turned to gravel, and Ginny saw Albuquerque in all its taupe and stony severity. “I was appalled,” she wrote, “to put it politely.” She had never seen such dust. Ginny was an up-to-the-minute woman, in knee skirts and shoulder pads, finger-waved curls crimped below her ears; such fashions hadn’t yet arrived in New Mexico. At a tea party given in her honor, she was told “in no uncertain terms” that she should wear a long dress. “I rebelled but finally accepted the inevitable. I scraped to the bottom of my trousseau trying to find something suitable, but nobody at B. Altman’s had foreseen that I would be expected to wear a long dress . . . when the temperature was 101 degrees.”

  All went well, Ginny wrote, until the plates were cleared away and the men lit up their cigars. “There wasn’t a breath of fresh air, the red velvet drapes were closely drawn, the temperature still hovering around one hundred, and the spoiled New Bride, never having been exposed to such heat or to men who smoked cigars,” plunged out the front door, she wrote, “and vomited quite thoroughly, trying not to spatter my dress or shoes. Between heaves I hung on to the trunk of a small sapling.” Like Julia, Ginny was a woman of sensitive constitution stranded among men of business and left to her own sometimes insufficient resources. It was not easy to be a new bride in New Mexico—not in 1866, not in 1935.

  Nor was it easy to be a mother and aging wife so far from home. I like to think that there was a time when my grandparents were happy—but all I know for certain is that in the end they were miserable. After thirty-five years, the marriage dissolved in a noxious stew of alcohol and anger. My grandfather remarried the day after the divorce came through, and Ginny retreated, at age sixty, to the brackish, bug-stippled pond in Rhode Island where she had spent summers as a child, and where she lived in a house on stilts. She vacationed on cruise ships, drove a Buick convertible, and maintained an excellent suntan. She dran
k coffee with her pinkie pointing skyward; at noon she switched to vodka. Ginny felt that she had lost much to those long decades in the desert—her youth, equanimity, and good humor. She never remarried. After her death we found a raft of poems that suggested there had been a great love in her life (“I write to you so often / In letters never shown”) and that he was not my grandfather.

  No wonder Ginny’s writing about Julia seeped disappointment and longing. “I often wonder about the German Bride,” she wrote, reflecting on Horgan’s chapter on Julia. “Was she always so gracious and charming, the perfect lady? Wouldn’t she have been annoyed by the rasping of frontier fiddles, condescending toward the provincial theatricals, bored with the literary pretensions of the exclusive Ladies Reading Society?” Ginny aired “other speculations” about Julia, as well. “Did she really continue to adore with undeviating devotion her entrepreneur husband who got her into this mess in the first place?” she wrote. My grandmother clearly hadn’t continued to adore her own entrepreneur husband.

  Ginny had written this essay before the family learned about Julia’s ghost, but she, too, projected onto Julia her own preoccupations. For me as a younger woman, Julia’s story was about women professionally and politically oppressed; for Lynne and Joanna, it involved cruel husbands. For Ginny, I suspect, it reflected the horror of marrying the wrong person—and then learning, perhaps, that the right one was nearby, yet painfully out of reach. “When a young French priest arrived,” Ginny wrote about Julia, “the young bride and the young bishop had much in common.”