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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  No wonder Abraham and the family turned right around and headed off to Europe. The Continent offered one kind of cure for Julia, and another for Abraham. Only one of them would be successful.

  Margaret

  “I LOOK FOR GHOSTS; but none will force their way to me,” wrote William Wordsworth about a woman named Margaret, who had lost a child and been undone by grief. “The very shadows of the clouds / Have power to shake me as they pass.” The Margaret of the poem felt a terrible urgency to find her lost child’s ghost. My search for Julia was less fraught, but like Margaret, I was trying, through various assorted methods, to speak to the dead.

  I decided to give medical marijuana a try. The psychics I consulted had told me that Julia might address me directly, if only I was open to it. It was the openness that vexed me. I am not a regular marijuana user—it makes me anxious. But a friend with a medical prescription gave me a cookie, and I took a tiny bite. Nothing much happened at first; I fell asleep. And then I woke an hour later, and I realized that everything looked pink.

  This was OK, initially. But soon my thoughts began to tiptoe out of my head before I could finish thinking them. And my heart began to beat very loudly, and I began to worry for my health, for my future, for the world. My husband lay beside me in bed, sound asleep. I contemplated waking him, but I couldn’t imagine what he could do to help me. I glanced at my bedside clock. It said 11:11. An hour later, I looked again. It said 11:13.

  I went downstairs and threw up. My stomach hurt not from gastrointestinal complaint but rather from panic. I wanted the cookie to go away. I brushed my teeth for what seemed an eternity, then turned on my phone and pulled up a search engine. “How long does edible marijuana last?” Though I knew the answer already: many more hours. I threw up again, commenced another epic tooth-brushing session, and tried another search: “How come down weed?” I read something about orange juice. I drank orange juice. I tried to read, but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I turned on the television; I couldn’t follow the plot. I sat bolt upright on the couch in the kids’ playroom, staring straight ahead. Back to my phone: “Die marijuana overdose?” I was only slightly reassured by the answer.

  How had it been for Julia to battle these interior demons, the ghosts of the mind? My problem was now inside me, as Julia’s must have been. I thought of Emily Dickinson—another shut-in: “One need not be a chamber to be haunted,” she wrote. “One need not be a house; / The brain has corridors surpassing / Material place.” Better to meet an “external ghost,” she wrote, “Than, moonless, one’s own self encounter / In lonesome place.” I didn’t want to meet myself that way. I didn’t want to be haunted.

  I sat wretched, hugging my knees on the playroom couch, and I knew that if ever there were a time when I might be receptive to a voice from the other side, it would be now—my brain was unpeeled, my rational mind collapsed. I was open. I called for Julia. I waited with my hands on my thighs. I closed my eyes. I implored her: Come. Tell me what happened. Speak of the past.

  But she didn’t, not yet.

  twenty-one

  TALE OF WOE

  Julia’s mother, Henriette Schuster.

  Family collection.

  By the time Abraham returned to Santa Fe from Europe, the papers seemed to have forgotten, or forgiven, his scandal-tinged departure—the ugly election, the gambling losses, the militia warrants. The Santa Fe Sun, which had goaded him ceaselessly six months before, welcomed him back: “A. Staab, one of the oldest and richest wholesale merchants in the territory, has returned to his beautiful Santa Fe home from an extended European tour.” The New Mexican commented on his improved health. “Hon. A. Staab returned Saturday night looking hale and hearty and ready for any amount of business.” A few days after Abraham’s return, he sued his nephew Alexander Gusdorf for $29,861.85—for what, I couldn’t ascertain. Abraham was, indeed, ready for business.

  Julia, meanwhile, had moved into a private villa at the spa in the Harz Mountains. Bertha and Delia accompanied her, tasked by Abraham with keeping her close and meeting her needs. “Tues 25 Aug 1891—We have unpacked everything,” Bertha wrote.

  The villa is built very prettily; it is quite large and is situated right in front of the woods on a grassy slope overlooking the town. The air is very fresh; we can actually feel that it is pure. The principal thing is the utter restfulness of the place; it is very quiet—quieter even than Santa Fe. Astonishing but true. If mamma’s nerves don’t get strong here, I don’t know where they can.

  Things were indeed quiet at the spa. For Bertha, young and impatient, time seemed to sputter out. “It seems ages that we’ve been here,” she wrote the day after they arrived.

  We embroider, walk and read and read and embroider and walk—don’t know a soul and not likely to make acquaintances. Few people in the house and they are mostly old and have their meals served in their own rooms—but if mamma only gets well quickly all will be well.

  In the days that followed, the girls continued to embroider, walk, and read. They composed witty poems directed at various young gentlemen of their acquaintance (“you pass the girls without a smile / and act in altogether a shabby style”). Time dawdled, excruciating and unhurried. “Monday we will be here three weeks,” Bertha wrote in mid-September.

  As yet mamma is not better. Her spells take place about every other day; she has one good and one bad day. To-day she has had the worst nervous attack she has ever had during this illness—hope it will not return again—Mamma was so discouraged that she wanted to go away from here at once—of course we cannot do that, for where shall we go?

  Not knowing what to do, they wrote their aunt Adelheid and asked her to stay “for a week or ten days in order to help encourage mamma and so that she has somebody with her, who is more experienced than we are.” Julia saw her doctor each day. Sometimes he’d call on her, other times she’d go to see him. “He says mamma will get entirely better, but that nervousness doesn’t go away in a day but requires time and courage—The patient can do more for herself than others can do, by trying to be calm.”

  A Mrs. Flechtheim—another spa patron—visited from time to time “to talk and enliven mamma.” Bertha and Delia would take walks with the Flechtheim family, “changing off” so that Julia was never left alone. They did a bit of sightseeing when they could, visiting whatever high points and monuments they could find in the nearby hills. In the absence of young gentlemen, Bertha flirted instead with Julia’s doctor.

  I have made a conquest of him. He is old and married so there’s no danger! He told me that he had always imagined ‘Queen Mab’ in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” just like my sweet self!

  Childish fancies, they were, but more enjoyable than what Bertha beheld in the earthbound world—the frightening tenacity of Julia’s illness, the tide of her health ebbing further from shore. Julia was sick—in her head, and in her heart. “I hope this won’t last much longer, for it is dreadful,” Bertha wrote.

  When Tante Adelheid arrived, Julia improved for a time. Adelheid was a “splendid nurse,” and everyone quickly cheered up. “Her arrival had a very good effect upon mamma’s condition,” Bertha wrote.

  The day before aunt came Delia and I almost despaired, mamma looked so strangely and talked so mournfully. It seems that her condition was such a critical one that the least excitement, bad or good, could turn the scales for better or worse. Aunt’s arrival accomplished that; the beautiful change brought about by her coming seemed to take place at once and a slight but steady improvement has been going on ever since. Thank goodness the worst days are over and we need have no fears for her eventual entire recovery.

  Bertha was happy to think that in her letters to Abraham, she might be able to offer more encouraging news, not the “same old tale of woe, ‘no change for the better.’ Now at least we can afford ourselves and him the satisfaction of hoping for speedy recovery.”

  But Julia’s improvement was short-lived. After Adelheid went home, Julia returned to bed, and
the family determined that the Harzburg spa had healed her no better than any other. They would stay another week in “this dullness and quiet,” Bertha wrote, and return to Hanover to be near Julia’s mother and sisters. “There is absolutely nothing new,” Bertha wrote. On sad days, Bertha reminded herself, “This too will pass away”; on gladder days, she tried to “enjoy the present.”

  They left Harzburg in early October. “Mrs. A. Staab and daughters are in Hanover, Germany,” the New Mexican reported. “Mrs. Staab has been quite ill, but is slowly recovering and gaining strength.” But the New Mexican had it wrong. Julia wasn’t improving. She was descending into an underworld from which the sunlit earth seemed more and more remote. Abraham, from afar, and his girls, at Julia’s side, could only look on as winter fell.

  After a few days in a Hanover hotel, the three Staab women found longer-term quarters for the winter. “Rather small rooms but comfortable and what is most important mamma can have (in the way of eating) what she wants and that’s at any time.”

  On November 13, Julia’s mother, Jette, the widow Schuster, died. The family held a service two days after her death, but didn’t tell Julia for another five days. “She had a very severe crying spell but after we had calmed her no bad effects,” Bertha wrote, “her nervous attacks are shorter but not less frequent yet.”

  After that entry, Bertha wrote in her diary less frequently. In the weeks that followed, she and Delia had their photographs taken. They watched over their mother each day. Bertha was seized with a fit of self-loathing. “I wish I were beautiful in every way, rich, charming, lovely, happy!!” Winter settled in. Delia wrote to the Santa Fe newspaper, reporting that Julia was slowly improving but that the weather in Hanover was “simply abominable.”

  They celebrated Christmas. Bertha didn’t seem to think this unusual, or if she did she didn’t mention it—this is what German Jews did in those years. If they were religious at all, these assimilated Jews tended to practice a mild “reform” version of their faith, couched in the language of the Enlightenment. They worshipped in gilded, neo-Gothic synagogues difficult to distinguish from the nearby churches, with pipe organs and German prayer books. They ate pork—bregenwurst, bratwurst, liverwurst. They spoke German exclusively—no more Yiddish. And on Christmas, they adorned fir trees with scented wax candles.

  That Christmas in Hanover, Bertha received a case for her spoons from Delia, a black lace Spanish shawl and a dozen embroidered handkerchiefs from Julia, a small painting from her brother Paul, and a new ring from Abraham, to replace the one she had lost in Los Angeles. She and Delia gave Julia a silver tea sieve.

  On New Year’s Eve, they went to bed well before midnight—Bertha had come to expect less festivity in her life. During the short days of January, they learned to ice-skate, “and when we had learned, it thawed and thew and watered and sent our skates to rest on a nail in the wall.” And then, in mid-February, an awful thing befell Julia—something so bad that Bertha couldn’t bring herself to write of it. “Mamma had been progressing very very slowly from Nov till February 12,” Bertha wrote.

  So slowly, that sometimes we doubted whether she improved at all. The last few days before that dreadful accident, we thought everything was going along nicely.—Delia thought of going to Cologne at the end of the month and our plans were beginning to look real and the future seemed to have a tinge of rosiness.

  But no—that awful day the 12th—I shan’t say anything about it—everything has turned out well and we must be thankful that it is not worse.

  Mamma is in bed, but will get up in a few days. The bandages are to be taken off Friday and we pray and hope all will be well—

  A letter was sent to Papa—instructing him and telling him all facts. The doctor said it was our duty. We have a sister to attend to Mamma’s wants.

  And there the diary ended, along with the family’s hopes for a happier result for Julia. I imagined that the days and weeks that followed the abrupt ending of the diary must have been terrible for Bertha and Delia. For me, though separated from those raw emotions by the large gulf of history, it was an unhappy leave-taking, as well. I’d learn no more about Julia’s “dreadful accident.” Bertha, who went on about every “young gentleman” who crossed her path, couldn’t bear to explain what had happened to her mother. Julia had been doing better, she said—which suggests that Julia’s condition took a turn for the worse, and that the “accident” somehow involved her condition. She was in bandages. It was months, now, after the surgery on her womb, so it was unlikely that the bandaging had anything to do with her surgical site. Had Julia wandered in the night and fallen? Had she been cut somehow? Wounded herself in the bathtub? I couldn’t know. Bertha wouldn’t tell. It was too horrible.

  Abraham and the girls had trusted that Germany would help. Superior doctors, unrivalled spas, familiarity, family, sisters, home: they’d believed in happy endings—in an American fairy tale, all triumph and no decline. But Germany was no panacea. Bertha’s grand European adventure, Julia’s quest for health and healing—it was all ruined.

  twenty-two

  THE ANGEL OF NEUHAUS

  Wolfgang Mueller as a young man.

  Courtesy of Sonya Mueller.

  I didn’t want the diary to end. There was so much I still needed Bertha to tell me. The last page contained a scrawled ledger noting what she had paid for various items: books, stamps, a curling iron, coffee, and three spoons (two dollars each). I scrutinized it, looking for answers.

  I was disappointed that Bertha hadn’t told me everything I needed to know. But I was also grateful that something so personal had survived the long years at all. It was a gift. The tactile realness of the document made me feel that much closer to my troubled family, and to the past—filtered though it was through Bertha’s twenty-one-year-old eyes, and stifled by all the taboos of the era: sex, female problems, illness, madness. I would have to accept that Julia remained unknowable, by dint of both time and disposition. But I now knew something, at least, of her moods and her travels, her pain, and the struggles of her children and husband as they tried to save Julia and came to grips, by stages, with the inevitability of her decline.

  That was more than most of us know of our forebears. In most families, we have only stories, told from parent to child and from those children to their own, handed from generation to generation, stretched and twisted and muddled with each new telling.

  I would have to rely on hearsay from there on out. I was of course a generation or three too far removed to learn anything firsthand. When my grandfather died in 2007, he had been the last of Julia’s living grandchildren—and he was born more than a decade after Julia died. Now, our oldest living relative was a woman named Betty Mae Hartman, my father’s second cousin and Julia’s great-granddaughter. She lived alone in a small adobe in downtown Albuquerque that was nothing like the stately home of her great-grandfather. It was a one-story building of modest ambition. Apparently, the dry goods dollars hadn’t sustained this branch of the family any more than they had my own. I visited Betty Mae—meeting her for the first time—on a blustery spring morning in 2012. She was ninety-three and walked unsteadily, ushering me through a dark carpeted living room full of family photographs to a large sunroom where she spent much of her time in a comfortable upholstered recliner. The room was cheerful and bright, cluttered with crocheted blankets and cushions and doodads.

  Betty Mae had once been a beauty—a dark and dainty, simmering Jewish beauty. She still had the lush black eyelashes of a younger woman and razor-sharp cheekbones, a scaffolding of loveliness that had withstood the havoc of age. Anna, Julia’s eldest, was Betty Mae’s grandmother. When Betty Mae was young, Anna lived with her husband, Louis, in a grand European-style home that Abraham had built for them in downtown Albuquerque; it had two stories, two parlors, a solarium, servants’ quarters, china service for eighteen, exotic birds, tennis courts, a garage, and two barns—one for horses, one for cows. In the summertime, Anna and Louis packed up the cows
and moved to Abraham’s house in Santa Fe, where it was cooler.

  Bertha, married by then to my great-grandfather, Max Nordhaus, lived down the street from Anna and Louis in an elegant neoclassical building. The two sisters were close—thick as thieves, Betty Mae told me. She perched in her chair in the sun, sharing stories from her childhood in Albuquerque, and when the memories ran out, we looked at photos from those long-ago times.

  Before she sent me on my way, Betty Mae mentioned that she had, as a teenager, “gone out” with a second cousin named Wolfgang Mueller, who was a refugee fresh from Germany. He was, she told me, a grandson of Julia’s youngest sister, Emilie. He knew all about Julia’s family in Germany, she said. I found his phone number, and when I returned home to Colorado, I called him.

  Wolfgang lived in Washington, DC, where he had moved after serving in the army during World War II. He had run a meat supply company for many years, and then, in his seventies, he’d started a fish supply company. “If you visit,” he promised, his voice resounding, German accent still thick, “I will feed you fish. Very fresh.” I mentioned that I had met Betty Mae. He had also seen her recently in New Mexico, he told me. I started to tell him that she was still quite striking, but he interrupted. “At one time she was very lovely,” he said, “but she has aged a lot.” He paused for a moment. “I have weathered the time very well.”

  He had indeed. At the age of ninety-three, he still played tennis almost every day. He traveled to Europe regularly—he was leaving in a few weeks, he told me, for a river cruise on the Danube. It took me until autumn to arrange to visit him at his large and tastefully appointed townhome in Washington, where he did, as promised, feed me very fresh halibut. He looked as if he were still in his seventies, with a full head of brown-streaked hair; his eyebrows were black. He had a robust bearing, and his plummy, deep voice contained none of the quavers of age. His skin was smooth, preternaturally so—I wondered, idly, if he’d had some work done. In this family, there were people like Wolfgang, with his booming confidence, and like Flora Spiegelberg, with her civic projects and campaign for world peace, and my grandfather, who fought World War II on skis and built a tram up to the crest of the Sandia Mountains and spent a long legal career fighting for Native American rights. These were people who lived long and full lives. They were satisfied, immodest, unapologetic: happy.