The specific treatment offered in Bad Pyrmont involved hydropathy, known more commonly as the “water cure.” Though baths and mineral springs had seen therapeutic use dating back to ancient Egypt, this particular cure had grown fashionable among the upper classes and their doctors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If time and money allowed, patients “took the waters” at the famous spas of Europe—Carlsbad and Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, Marienbad and Gastein, and also Bad Pyrmont. In the American West, wealthy health-seekers favored the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, where Abraham and Bertha had stayed during their California sojourn; the Atchinson, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway had also built an elegant “hotel for invalids” in Montezuma, New Mexico, at natural hot springs about seventy miles from Santa Fe. Julia and Abraham visited those springs regularly. “They are a sure cure for chronic diseases,” wrote the Denver Rocky Mountain News, “such as rheumatism, gout, scrofula, and other diseases of the skin, especially syphilis.”
The idea was, essentially, to wash away disease: “Wash and Be Healed” was the spa movement’s motto. Patients would expunge bad air, impure food and drink, indolence, overexertion, improper light, and unregulated passions through quaffing and bathing, and then quaffing and bathing some more: sitz baths, eye baths, hand and foot baths, pouring baths, half baths, full baths, hot baths, warm baths, cold baths, head-dousings, hot compresses, warm compresses, cold compresses, mineral water consumption, mineral steam inhalation, and cold water immersion of the unpleasant sort that Nellie Bly and the other hystericals received at the lunatic asylum. (“Place the head over a basin, and pour water from a jug over the head and chest until the patient becomes chilly and revives,” wrote the hydropathic pioneer R. T. Trail.)
The water cure wasn’t only for the weak; the hale and hearty also thought it beneficial. The feminist icon Susan B. Anthony took the waters in Massachusetts in 1885. “First thing in the morning,” she wrote, “dripping sheet; pack at 10 o’clock for forty-five minutes, come out of that and take a shower, followed by a sitz bath, with a pail of water at 75 degrees poured over the shoulders, after which dry sheet, and then brisk exercises. At 4 p.m., the programme repeated, and then again at 9 p.m.” Each day at the spa involved “four baths, four dressings and undressings, four exercisings, one drive and three eatings.” In Bad Pyrmont, it involved many drinkings as well: Herr Willeke told me that visitors drank sixty or so glasses of water in two hours.
Different minerals were supposed to possess different healing qualities. Alkaline waters were recommended for diabetes, malaria, and reproductive and genitourinary afflictions; salty waters were best for skin afflictions and catarrhal (phlegmy) infections; sulfur was good for liver and respiratory disease. Five thousand meters below the placid city where my mother and I sat with Herr Willeke, poring over old advertisements for chocolate and patent medicines, more than seventy water sources mixed with those minerals and erupted from a volcanic fault. In the cast-iron temple in the center of town called the Wandelhalle, one could drink from an array of the town’s most cherished sources. The Helenquelle, the Helena spring, emitted a Sauerwasser—salty water—that was good for digestion, but bad for the heart. The Friedrichsquelle contained iron and was good for the heart. The Trampelquelle helped with digestive distress; the Augenquelle reduced eye inflammation. Water from those springs was also piped into the steel bathing house and diverted into individual bath chambers and mist machines.
The Bad Pyrmont waters were used to treat anemia, “weak blood,” malaria, neurological problems, impotence, bedwetting, “albumin in the urine,” a “calloused heart,” “English sickness,” and “masculine sexual malfunction” such as excessive sperm production and “shrinkages.” They were thought to be particularly helpful for problems like Julia’s—“the so-called women’s conditions,” wrote a Dr. Seebohm, who published a travel guide touting Bad Pyrmont around the time Julia visited: “blood and mucous flows, irregular and painful periods, problems during pregnancy and post-partum, infertility.” That July, Julia spent weeks in bathtubs, sopping up the waters. What she suffered, mental or physical, the doctors of Bad Pyrmont believed they could relieve.
Along with all the dousing and soaking, Bad Pyrmont offered plenty of socializing. Bertha was excited at the prospect. German spas, frequented by royalty and the growing class of people who lived like royalty, played an important role in the elaborate social rituals of the wealthy. Princes and hangers-on passed through Bad Pyrmont regularly. Peter the Great visited in the eighteenth century; Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia was said to have accidentally invented the trouser crease while on holiday there in the nineteenth. The iconic German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe visited as well, finding Bad Pyrmont’s vapor caves mesmerizing: “the soap bubbles happily dancing on the invisible elements, the sudden extinguishing of a lambent straw smudge, the instant ignition of a candle.” Tens of thousands of people came there each summer.
Indeed, Herr Willeke thought it impossible that Julia and Bertha could have stayed in Bad Pyrmont for longer than a week. It was simply too crowded to accommodate lengthy stays, he told us, and too expensive. I knew from the diary, however, that Julia and Bertha did stay for longer. They had the money, clearly, and also the motivation: they were desperate to get Julia better. Intrigued, Herr Willeke looked again at Julia’s entry on the Kurliste, running a stout finger down the musty column that announced the guests’ sleeping arrangements. When he found Julia and Bertha’s lodgings, he clucked in excitement. They had taken rooms at the private pension of Frau Alice Breithaupt. He knew exactly where.
We descended from the library tower, clambered into the Audi, and threaded the streets to a hillside overlooking a small park. The pension of Frau Breithaupt—Julia’s home during her stay in Bad Pyrmont—was an oddly shaped three-story building at the intersection of two angled streets. Ivy climbed the gray plaster facade, which was punctuated by an arched door, elaborately linteled windows, and a curly wrought-iron balcony. A century and a quarter after Julia’s stay, a restaurant now occupied the ground floor, and the offices of a financial adviser and a mediator resided on the second floor. The top floor still housed dwellings, their large windows full of light. I imagined Julia standing at the third-story balcony, the valley spreading out beneath her, breathing the healing air. It was a good location, Herr Willeke assured us—close to the Kurpark and the baths. We must have looked a strange group, staring up at this old building, Herr Willeke in his timeworn blazer, gesturing hurriedly, me with my notebook and smartphone, taking notes and photos, my petite gray-haired mother bouncing between us, translating gamely. We walked around the side of the building for another view, and Herr Willeke pointed at the building just downhill from Frau Breithaupt’s. He told us it served during Julia’s time as a home for illegitimate children, produced by the couplings of spa guests and the local servants.
There was plenty of coupling in Bad Pyrmont, he said, illicit and otherwise. These days, the odds were much better for those in Herr Willeke’s set. “It’s a good place to find wealthy widows,” he joked. Back then, however, the spa was a marriage market for the young: a place not only to heal, but to mingle. “It was very common,” Herr Willeke told us, “that girls came there looking for husbands.” Bertha, alas, wasn’t able to mingle nearly as much as she would have liked. She was stuck alone with her invalid mother. “Mamma is not able to go out much—Do not know a soul,” she wrote. Thus she “was awfully glad” when Abraham and Delia came from Carlsbad to join them a week after she and Julia arrived. Other family—Bertha’s spinster aunt Regine and her aunt Bernhardine and uncle Bernhard Nussbaum—also visited from Hanover. Julia appeared cheered by her siblings, Bertha wrote; they were part of the cure. Some of them, however, irked Bertha. “I cannot bear Uncle N”; Uncle Nussbaum, Bertha wrote, “grunts all the time and thinks everything I say funny—not silly but foolish.” She could bear his son Arthur better. “Took walks with Arthur N to the Erdfalle and Bomberg—very pretty walks.”
/> Besides the relentless promenading along the Kurstrasse—bonnets and bustles and ruffles and gloves, full regalia—there were, during high season, garden parties, balloon rides, fireworks, three Princely Cure Ensemble concerts each day, and five theater performances each week. Bertha attended a number of shows. “Am gone on an actor who plays in the Pyrmonter Theatre—Very good-looking—Hermann Leffler,” she wrote—he would later become a star of Berlin theater and early German film. “He hasn’t vouchsafed me a glance, however.” Even Bertha’s foolish starstruck moments seemed momentous to me, reading them a hundred and thirty years after they were written; they were antediluvian in their language but somehow modern in their sentiments.
Bertha also managed to attend some of the Saturday promenade balls in the Kurhaus reception hall. “Fri 24th July—mamma was sick,” she wrote in her diary, alarmed that she might not be able to attend that week’s ball. Julia’s progress in recovering from her surgery had proceeded slowly. By Saturday, however, she seemed well enough that Bertha and Delia could attend the ball. But it was a disappointment: “No gentlemen came near us. The proportion of ladies to gentlemen was ten to one.” So the Staab girls, brashly, made do. “Delia and I danced together, also with a Fräulein Kasse from Berlin—and thereby astonished” the dignified Europeans who were present. In America, their propriety seemed dowdily German; in Germany, they were daring and American.
seventeen
SCHUSTERGARTEN
In Lügde’s Jewish cemetery.
Courtesy of the author.
Having exhausted Bad Pyrmont’s Julia-related archival resources, we climbed back into Herr Willeke’s ancient Audi and set out for Lügde. The road from Bad Pyrmont to Lügde barreled straight alongside the autobahn, past car dealerships, factories, and warehouses, until the highway tunneled under the old town of Lügde. From there we left the larger road and curved up a hill, winding up to an ancient Romanesque stone church built on the spot where Charlemagne celebrated Christmas in the year 784. Herr Willeke parked the Audi on a gritty shoulder and we strolled over to the church. It was cold inside the thick stone walls, the late autumn light chinking in through a few high windows. Outside, Herr Willeke told us about a rosebush said to bloom eternally over an image of the Virgin Mary found in a stone on the site; now an equally miraculous eight-hundred-year-old linden spread its limbs above us. We would see more of Lügde, Herr Willeke promised, but first: lunch.
He drove us to a hotel in the hills above town, worth it for the view alone—a patchwork of green, the river Emmer lazing past, narrow roads that wound through tunnels of beeches and lindens, past apple orchards, stone farmhouses, handsome feudal villages, and picture-book forest, weeping trees in autumn opulence. The hills ascended gently toward Köterberg—Mount Bow-Wow. How Julia must have loved the place this time of year. As I gazed out across the lush scenery of Julia’s childhood, I found it easier to understand what she must have felt was taken from her.
In the restaurant, Herr Willeke ordered carefully. He had thin, white wrists, and delicate hands that seemed not to fit his otherwise meaty frame. He was, he told us, allergic to all sorts of things—nuts, honey, milk, beer—everything except meat and processed foods. He sang in a choir and he had run, several times, for local office as a Social Democrat—but it seemed to me that the past was, somehow, more real to this beer-sensitive German than the present moment in which we sat looking over the Pyrmont valley and Lügde, eating Schwein. There was a wistful formality about Herr Willeke. We wandered the same bygone world, he and I, sifting through ghosts, mining the past for clues to the present.
On the way down from lunch, we wound through the new section of Lügde, built after World War II to house German refugees from what was originally Silesia, now part of Poland. Other migrants, mostly Turks, lived there now, their ersatz Fachwerk half-timber homes clinging to the hillsides. Herr Willeke pointed out seven small chapels—stations of the cross—and the place where the flaming Osterrad hay wheel still rolled downhill each Easter, as it had for hundreds of years. “It was a tradition which the Schusters”—Julia’s family—“would have known,” he said. I imagined the Schusters gathered to watch: Julia as a child with her many siblings; Julia bringing her own children from the New Mexico desert to see the wheel retracing the same path year after year, a tradition that would outdate and outlive them all. It was odd, to feel nostalgic for a place I’d never been and a tradition I’d never witnessed, but I did. There are places that always bring a flood of childhood ghosts: the stunted forsythias at the entrance to my elementary school; the crackling ponderosa forest behind my great-grandfather’s stone home in the New Mexico foothills. On this redolent autumn day, Lügde swamped me with a similar wistfulness.
We climbed back into the Audi and descended toward the old village, parked at the edge of what was once the upper city gate, and wandered uphill to a fenced-off park sandwiched between a housing project and an elementary school. Herr Willeke led us to a wrought-iron gate hung between two ivy-mounded brick posts and adorned with a Jewish star. This was the Jewish graveyard—the Schustergarten, they called it, because the town’s Jews had purchased it in 1887 from Julia’s mother, the widow Schuster, in order to relocate an earlier plot beside the town wall. We strolled across well-tended grass toward the stone grave markers: some upright, some listing. The first stone we reached was that of Philipp Schuster, who died in a 1866 cholera outbreak that killed “126 people and one Jew,” according to town record-keepers. Philipp was that one Jew—Julia’s cousin, who died the year that she arrived in America, his stone a reminder that in 1866, in Lügde, a Jew was not considered entirely a person. Julia’s family—and Abraham’s—came from here, but they never belonged.
We found Julia’s father’s gravestone as well: Levi David Schuster, who died on May 16, 1877. That was, I realized, only two weeks before Sister Blandina accompanied a troubled Julia by horse-drawn coach to Trinidad so she could take the train east to New York and travel from there to Germany. Julia’s father had only just died. The trials of motherhood and “female problems” and loneliness may have helped form her sadness in the days when Blandina cared for her, but something much more specific also played a part: an ocean and a continent away, Julia’s father was gone.
Even after all the months I had spent digging through her past, Julia remained so tantalizingly remote. I was coming to know the people around her—Bertha through her diary, Abraham through his public presence. But Julia, sequestered by time and disposition, continued to elude my understanding. Now, however, I had learned that she had lost a parent. This sadness I could understand. Of course she was unhappy; she was mourning.
We passed some graves so heavily mounded in ivy that it was impossible to find the stone—Herr Willeke, who kept a map of the graveyard in his house, assured us they weren’t Schusters or Staabs. In the back corner, we found a familiar name, “Jette Staab, geb Spiegelberg”—Abraham’s mother, who had married Moses Staab in 1832. She was a Spiegelberg by birth, which explained, a little better, how Abraham came to Santa Fe. He and the Spiegelberg brothers must have been first cousins; his mother was a sister to their father. The stones told us this much.
We climbed back in the Audi and drove slowly now, inside the city walls, along a cobbled street to Herr Willeke’s home, a classic frame-and-timber house that had been occupied by his family for more than two centuries. There was a gingerbread humility about Lügde’s houses, with their Volk writing on the beams above the entry doors—Herr Willeke’s offered the information that it had been built in 1806 and renovated in the 1860s; a door lintel down the road took a more confrontational approach: “May all my enemies die suddenly and come back as ghosts.” Lügde was full of ghosts, Herr Willeke told us with a quick smile. And I could feel them: if not the specific ghosts, then at least the weight of the past.
We wandered two blocks down Herr Willeke’s street on foot, into the center of town. A bridge ran across the Emmer, its banks stacked with riprap against the summer flood
s. A park and a playground occupied the upriver meadows; we could see an electrical wire factory a few hundred yards downriver. We headed back up another cobbled street of large Fachwerk homes—all thirty meters long, many built in the 1600s. Their plaster-and-wood patchwork facades were reassuring in their Old World sameness, house after house with steep shingled roofs and big arched front doors.
We walked around Lügde’s cathedral—it was tall and dignified, of brown brick, a bit dark. It had been built in 1895, Herr Willeke said, and during the construction, the town’s Jews had given money for the rose window in the front. “This was not unusual across Germany,” he told us; Jews often contributed to the construction of Catholic churches in the villages and cities where they hoped to remain in good graces. The cathedral had replaced an older church that stood during Abraham’s and Julia’s childhoods. And above the door of that church, Herr Willeke said, four letters were chiseled in Hebrew: JHWH, Yahweh.
Abraham had been familiar with tetragrammaton engravings on churches. He had known, well before Archbishop Lamy ever built his cathedral in Santa Fe, that they were not uncommon. Abraham was not “totally ignorant” of the fact that those Hebrew letters adorned Catholic churches across Europe, as Rabbi Fierman had posited. So perhaps he had funded the cathedral after all; perhaps he had asked Lamy to place the Hebrew letters above the door as a symbol of the contribution of Santa Fe’s Jews to the city’s spiritual life and material foundations, and also, perhaps, as a reminder of the church of his and Julia’s childhood.
American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest Page 16