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

by Hannah Nordhaus

  Still there was, Arthur’s lawyer suggested, a general “taint of insanity” in the family that began with the parents and worked its way down into the children. “Staab Family Eccentricities Aired in Court,” read an October 23 headline. “A recital of the peculiarities and eccentricities of various members of the family occupied a good part of the time of the court yesterday.” The Staabs’ longtime family physician, W. S. Harroun, took the stand: the mental condition of Paul Staab, the oldest brother, was compromised by epilepsy, he said, brought on by an early bout of meningitis. He explained that Abraham, at the time of his death, was suffering from “paresis.” I looked this up: “partial inability to move,” according to my Webster’s dictionary; “a problem with mental function due to damage to the brain from untreated syphilis,” according to an online medical dictionary. “Paresis,” uraemic trouble, miscarriages, meningitis, insanity—all these were consequences of syphilis, which wasn’t, until 1909, treatable with anything but doses of mercury—the side effects of which were often as bad as the disease itself. Perhaps Julia had suffered from syphilis, too.

  Harroun testified last about Julia’s condition. She was, for some years prior to her death, “insane,” the Journal reported—our first firm diagnosis of Julia’s malady. Sadly, the paper—exercising perhaps the same Victorian restraint that Bertha had shown in her diary—omitted further discussion, saying only that Julia’s mental illness was “due to causes that he”—the doctor—“described.” Hoping to read in the trial records what exactly he described, I called and wrote and emailed to courthouse after archive after courthouse seeking the transcripts, only to conclude, after months of searching, that the records from the trial had been irrevocably lost, along with my opportunity to know the “causes” of Julia’s insanity. But here, at any rate, is what Arthur implied: that Julia’s sadness was a condition, a trait handed down in the family, like small stature or long ring fingers—her bequest. And that Julius, like his mother, battled demons.

  The trial was, at the time, the longest civil case in Bernalillo County history. In the closing days, the arguments revolved around whether Arthur’s family had turned away from him because they were crazy or because he was dishonest. When Teddy testified, he denied that the family had been worried about Julius’s mental state, and described “with infinite pathos,” Julius’s final trip abroad, how they “had gone from one to another European resort in a vain endeavor to regain his health”—not all that different from Julia’s odyssey two decades earlier. “Throughout Dr. Staab’s narrative members of the jury leaned forward in their seats to hear what he had to say,” reported the Journal, “while a hush pervaded the courtroom as the spectators breathlessly followed his story.” A family’s ghost and demons—its once hidden past—was now on display.

  Teddy explained that Abraham had not disinherited Arthur because of his marriage to a Gentile—though Abraham was angry that Arthur hadn’t asked his permission, and Teddy “admitted having heard him say that marriages between people of the same religion were always the happiest.” Rather, Abraham cut Arthur out of the family, Teddy said, because Arthur had stolen from them. “My father trusted him implicitly in money matters and this trust was often abused. He took money from my father. He stole jewelry from my mother,” Teddy said.

  Arthur, during his turn on the stand, insisted that any money he had taken had been promised to him to compensate for Julius’s and Teddy’s expensive Ivy League education—after only two years at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, Arthur had been called home to work for Abraham. Abraham had given Arthur authority, he said, to spend up to $10,000 a year. But after Arthur’s marriage, Abraham and Julius had turned on him. They had invited Arthur to meet at the house of a family friend, searched him for a weapon, and accused him of stealing money and pawning Julia’s jewelry in El Paso. Arthur had signed a confession admitting the thefts, but he explained that he had signed it without reading it—only, he explained, because his wife was sick and he “did not want to cause her a shock.”

  Abraham hated Arthur without reason, Arthur said. This German Jewish patriarch could not abide his too-American child, and he dangled his inheritance as the price of compliance. “The witness told a story . . . of hostility to him and favoritism to his brothers from his early youth—of fidelity to the interest of his father which was repaid by unkindness and bitterness.” Abraham had once threatened to disinherit Julius, too, until Arthur “pleaded long and earnestly with his father to ‘give Julius another chance.’” Abraham’s displeasure had a fearsome price.

  This was why, when Arthur decided to marry, he told Abraham only that he was “going south.” He knew his father would oppose marriage to a Gentile, Arthur said, because Abraham had “broken up a former love affair . . . on that account.” After the marriage, Arthur didn’t see his father again until a month after he and his new wife returned to Santa Fe. He was sitting with her on a bench on the Plaza as Abraham walked past. Abraham at first pretended he didn’t see them. “Hello, Papa,” Arthur called. But Abraham said he wanted “nothing to do with him,” and walked on.

  Like Ishmael in the desert, Arthur was banished. He and Julia moved to Oklahoma City and opened a laundry. “Mrs. Staab, slender, graceful, and possessed of the soft voice that is typical of the high-bred southern woman”—testified about their tribulations in Oklahoma. Arthur’s savings had been lost in a Texas bank failure (though in his own testimony, he hadn’t been able to remember the name of the bank or the town in which it was located). At the laundry, they worked long hours, on Sundays, and at night, “and on some occasions until 5 o’clock in the morning to keep things going.” Julia had to pawn her rings to raise enough money to make payroll. She miscarried a pregnancy during that time. Abraham sent small remittances occasionally, though only to her. A year after they moved, Abraham visited, but he would speak only to Julia. He told her if she were ever in need she could always find a home with him in Santa Fe, but “on all occasions when Arthur’s name was mentioned, she said, his father spoke most bitterly of him, called him a fool, a thief and a liar . . . and told the witness that she was a fool to stick to him as she did.” By all accounts, Abraham was quite fond of young Julia. It was Arthur he couldn’t abide.

  Ilene

  I WAS INVITED TO a party at which a friend had arranged for ten-minute psychic sessions for all the guests. I don’t typically go to parties that include psychics—this was, in fact, a first. And though I felt I had probably done enough divining by now, this session was free, so I went into my friend’s office and sat down on the futon. This psychic’s name was Ilene. She had tawny skin and vivid purple-red hair, hoop earrings and bluey-purple fingernails. She told me to keep my feet on the ground and keep my eyes open, lest I be taken over by a spirit. We had only ten minutes, so I got to the point: I asked about Julia.

  “There was a boy,” Ilene said. Julia was looking for a boy she had lost, a child. Was it the baby? I asked her. No, not the baby. “She found the baby right away.” Ilene saw Julia pacing, wringing her hands, distraught. She needed to find her boy. He was the sweet one, the sensitive one. I began to list Julia’s boys in order of birth: Paul, the invalid—“That was a birth injury,” she told me—but no, it wasn’t him. Arthur? Not him. And before I even said the name, I knew, in the same way I had known when my friend pulled the four of clubs. It was Julius. “That’s him,” Ilene said—she knew it had something to do with Julia’s name, with jewels. Julia can’t find him. He wasn’t there when she died; she’s waiting, still waiting, to see him. She doesn’t know she’s passed, she can’t understand why there are people in her house. Ilene got teary-eyed. Julia had picked me, she said, because I could tell her story. “She wants people to know she wasn’t crazy.” Ilene saw Julia visiting me while I was in bed, stroking my hair. She saw lights, lots of lights. Our ten minutes were up.

  I took Ilene’s card and arranged a second visit in her office, a square room in Boulder’s tallest office building, with a view from her window ov
er the downtown rooftops. Ilene was also a life coach and a hypnotherapist—certificates lined the walls. She said she didn’t remember much from our session; she tried to wipe these things from her mind when they were over. “She’s south of here, yes?” she asked. “Not Mexico but something like that?” She saw a big house. The name Ida came to her. She told me I had an entourage of spirits around me—one of them was very tall. A child came forward; Ilene saw the letter J. “Definitely a very strong J,” she said. The letter A came through as well. “Does that mean anything? It’s very big. She’s showing me a very large A, a capital A.” A man, very protective. “She wasn’t a very large woman, she was a little thing. He was a large man.” I’d been thinking Abraham. Maybe Archbishop?

  In Ilene’s vision, Julia was wearing clothing typical of the period—a long skirt, cinched waist, high collar, sleeves. Ilene saw the “loss of a child,” an infant, she thought, and its devastating effect on Julia—Julia wringing her hands again, pacing, putting her hands over her face. But Ilene’s focus returned quickly to the other children, and in particular, to the little boy. “It’s almost to the point where the other children that I see are kind of just standing to the side, she’s put up this frozen barrier in her heart, she wants to love her children, but she’s depleted of emotion. She’s upset that she’s not being mother to her other children.” It must be the saddest thing, to forsake your children. The little boy kept coming up to her, but she had nothing to give him. Julius. She couldn’t even help herself.

  Ilene saw a house. She saw a long stairway, a grand staircase. She saw rooms with numbers on them, people sitting around the table—guests, not family. It looked like a boardinghouse. She saw a big porch. Kids running up and down the stairs. Servants. She saw burnt timbers at the top of the home, an outline of black charred beams. There was a fire. Julia was still there, pacing, anguished. “She can’t let go. She can’t leave.” She saw Julia going up and down the staircase, pacing on the front porch, in her room, in a chair, a rocking chair where she swayed incessantly, closed off and shrunken down. Her spirit died in that chair, Ilene said, though her body may have expired elsewhere. “She let the heaviness consume her.”

  The heaviness was beginning to weigh on Ilene as well; she needed to let Julia go. I was thanking Ilene when my shoulder itched—a bug, or a stray hair. I batted it away. “That was Julia touching you,” Ilene said.

  twenty-eight

  MAP OF THE WORLD

  Bertha in her later years.

  Family collection.

  In 1919, Franz Kafka wrote a long—an excruciatingly long—letter to his father. It ran about sixty-five pages, each paragraph alternately scathing and self-pitying, seeping self- and paternal-loathing, oozing angst. He never mailed it; it was, rather, a letter to himself. A letter, he once said, was “a communication with ghosts”—with our memories and demons and fantasies. In Kafka’s case, the ghost of his father loomed large. “You once asked me recently why I claim to be afraid of you,” Franz began. “I did not know, as usual, what to answer, partly out of my fear of you and partly because the cause of this fear consists of too many details for me to put even halfway into words.” Kafka blamed his father’s “strength, noise and violent temper,” for his own “weakly, timid, hesitant” constitution. He blamed his father for everything.

  Kafka’s father, Hermann, was, like Abraham, a German Jewish businessman, born a poor butcher’s son in southern Bohemia about a decade after Abraham, and sent out to work at an early age. He eventually opened a haberdashery, which he transformed into a large and successful wholesale firm. He, too, married a woman named Julia, daughter of a wealthy merchant. Franz was their eldest son—their only surviving son—and all the expectations of the family weighed on his narrow shoulders. Like Abraham, Hermann was confident and overbearing; unlike Abraham, he was physically imposing, too. Hermann towered well over six feet; Franz, though nearly as tall, was stooped. Hermann was strong; Franz was consumptive. Hermann was a carnivore, a consumer; Franz declared himself a vegetarian. Hermann was a man of business; his son a tortured artist. “You had worked your way up so far on nothing but your own strength, consequently you had unlimited confidence in your own opinion,” Kafka wrote. Franz, by contrast, had confidence in nothing. “From your armchair you ruled the world,” Kafka wrote. “Your opinion was right, every other was mad, eccentric, meshugge, abnormal.”

  I read Kafka’s letter while I was in Europe following the paths of Julia’s family, and I couldn’t help but think of Abraham, the blustery businessman, and his tortured sons, who were given all the opportunities—wealth, education—that their father didn’t have as a child, and who found them oppressive. Kafka fled his father’s shop. In the end, Arthur found an inelegant way to do the same. Betty Mae, my grandfather’s cousin, had described Abraham as a “typical Germanic person. When he said, ‘This is it,’ there was no argument.”

  In Hebrew, Abraham means “father of a multitude”—Abraham, the biblical patriarch, brooked no rebellion. Men like Abraham Staab and Hermann Kafka stretched themselves far beyond their early prospects: they created themselves. But they found it difficult to understand such impulses in their own sons. Our children always grow to live in a foreign country, removed not necessarily by ships across the sea but by era and disposition. The German Jewish patriarchs, for all their wit and guile, could not intuit their children’s needs. Hermann Kafka never actually beat his son. “But that shouting, the way you turned red in the face, the hasty undoing of your suspenders, laying them ready over the back of the chair, was almost worse for me,” Franz wrote.

  Kafka felt the burden of his father’s expectations so strongly that, he wrote, his back became bent, which led first to weakness, and then to indigestion, “and with that the way was open to every form of hypochondria until finally, under the superhuman effort of wanting to marry . . . blood came from my lung.” In their sons’ quaking eyes, these German fathers swelled into giants—flickering, fearsome projections that obscured the whole sky. “Sometimes I imagine the map of the world spread out and you stretched diagonally across it,” Kafka wrote to his father. Abraham stretched across his own proprietary expanse of desert, ruling his arid New World with a wagon and a ledger, controlling his offspring with prohibitions and manipulations, governing the mountains and mesas and arroyos and barren plains in which they dwelled.

  But Julia cast a shadow as well. She had her own sad center of gravity—and perhaps it pulled her sons in. Julius had been the achiever, the stable one, it seemed. Then came the problems at school—he left Harvard Law after a year, I learned, and never graduated from Columbia, either—and then the stomachaches, the insomnia, and the suicide. There was Paul, nervous debility made flesh. And there was Arthur, whose resentment toward his family approached pathology.

  Teddy seemed the only son to escape this curse. My father and his siblings remembered him well. Teddy was, Lizzie wrote, “the perfect dinner guest. He was handsome (although short), witty, could converse in three languages on almost any subject, and could make himself charming to both young and old.” He was a man of impeccable taste.

  After Julius died, Teddy quit his medical practice and traveled the world collecting art, which he kept in the high-ceilinged apartment on Madison Avenue where he spent winters—Renaissance altar cloths, Spanish Madonnas, Whistlers, Rembrandt etchings. He wore a houndstooth suit and a monocle (the New Mexican described him as “Chesterfieldian in demeanor and dress”) and he had an impish sense of humor: everyone remembered with fondness his puns and malapropisms (“comparisons are odoriferous”; “don’t cast asparagus”), his rhymes, his passion for tennis and swimming—he swam a mile every day well into old age. He was also gay (“Of course you know he was a homo,” Betty Mae told me—and I did know that, though we of the younger generations used different language). He lived for many years with a man named Mr. McRae, a Presbyterian, teetotaling bookkeeper for the family business, who played gin rummy with Teddy at night.

  But Tedd
y, like Julius and like Julia, suffered jags of severe depression. He was regularly coaxed by his family into lengthy stays at sanitariums, and he had a problem with prescription drugs—the problem being, specifically, that he had kept his medical license after he gave up his practice, and as late as the 1960s, when he was in his eighties and nineties, would write himself prescriptions for painkillers and sleeping pills. He also liked to partake of a pink alcohol-and-narcotic concoction called Excelsior Liniment, a patent medicine used “for the cure of rheumatism, neuralgia, pneumonia, pain in the back and side, lameness, headache, toothache, poison, sprains, bruises, burns, wounds, frost-bites, fractures, dislocations, ulcers, enlarged joints . . .” And also, perhaps, a broken heart.

  Teddy lived in his last years at the Park Plaza, a high-rise apartment building in Albuquerque built in the fortresslike Brutalist style, which must have once appeared imposing and modern against Albuquerque’s squat skyline—it is still the highest residential structure in the state—but now looks rather like a tenement. It was considered an upmarket address, and the well-heeled clientele probably frowned on the sight of Uncle Teddy prancing around the lobby, wizened, sloshed, and naked. The doorman would call Lizzie or my grandfather or Betty Mae, and they would bring him to the hospital to sober up. Then they would riffle through his cabinets to find the pills, liniments, and salves and throw them away. They eventually went to every pharmacy in town to warn about Teddy’s drug problem, but he still managed to get what he wanted. Finally, they wrote to the state medical board, demanding that it revoke his license. “We were forever rushing him to the hospital after an overdose or fall,” Lizzie wrote.