American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (17 page)

It is hard to know, then, if Julia’s surgery was aimed at her physical or mental ailments, since the suggested treatments for both were essentially the same: gynecological treatment or what was known as “the rest cure”—in Julia’s case, both surgery and the rest cure were prescribed. The latter involved bed rest, seclusion, a bland diet, and the renunciation of all intellectual pursuits. Writing, painting, drawing, and education were considered too stimulating for the mentally infirm female, as was reading novels, especially exciting ones. Women were counseled instead to read books on practical subjects, like beekeeping. The idea was both to calm the nerves and to regress the patient to a receptive, infantile state. Doctors also prescribed the rest cure for tuberculosis, arthritis, asthma, and bad hearts, but they were particularly fond of its use in the treatment of mental illness.

The nineteenth-century author Charlotte Perkins Gilman took the rest cure for depression after the birth of her first child; her doctor forbade her from writing, sketching, or reading, and, she explained later, she was reduced to playing with a rag doll on the floor. “I went home and obeyed those directions for some three months,” she wrote in a 1913 magazine article, “and came so near the borderline of utter mental ruin that I could see over.”

At the extreme end of the rest cure, institutionalization was an
option; Julia was fortunate to avoid this. In 1887, Nellie Bly, the crusading newspaperwoman, feigned madness to expose the torturous treatments imposed at the Women’s Lunatic Asylum on Blackwell’s Island in New York, a hospital that served mostly immigrant women. Quickly diagnosed—“Her delusions, her apathetic condition, the muscular twitching of her hands and arms, and her loss of memory all indicate hysteria,” explained the admitting physician—she was made to sit in the cold for much of each day, fed spoiled beef and tainted water, and doused daily with buckets of cold bathwater. “Take a perfectly sane and healthy woman,” Bly wrote in her subsequent exposé, “shut her up and make her sit from 6 am to 8 pm on straight-back benches, not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane.” Her newspaper,
The World
, arranged her release after ten days. Other inmates weren’t so fortunate. For that reason the wealthy, like Julia, preferred to undergo treatment in their homes.

Julia was, in some respects, lucky. She had money, and a family—including, yes, a husband—who worried for her and supported her, though Abraham, like most men of the time, did so mostly from afar. Depression is lonely and often terrifying now, but back then there was even less recourse for those in its grip. There were no antidepressants, no cognitive-behavioral treatments; there was no talk therapy or Valium. Julia could have squeezed into Dr. Scott’s electric corset, a girdle fitted with steel electrodes where the whalebones should have been, or tried other forms of “electrotherapy” intended to recharge a patient’s enervated nervous system through the application of low-voltage current.

She could have taken patent medicines—dubious, sometimes dangerous herbal concoctions. Dr. R. C. Flowers’s Nerve Pills were designed to “Overcome Sleeplessness, Restlessness, and Hysteria,” while
“Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription” was supposed to build up “the shattered nerves” by acting “directly on the delicate and important organs concerned in wifehood and motherhood.” An 1890s advertisement in a Santa Fe newspaper for Dr. Pierce’s remedy urged readers to imagine full recovery. “The fan that long lay listless and idle in the lap of an invalid again speaks the eloquent language of a healthy, happy woman.” Julia probably did not have access to a treatment available in East Coast cities, in which doctors massaged women’s genitals to elicit therapeutic “convulsions.” This would have been a pleasant course of treatment, no doubt. So, too, would visits to a spa for a dose of healing and rest.

And this is what Julia did after a week’s recovery from her surgery in Berlin. It was time for gentler treatment. So she and Bertha boarded a train heading west and slightly south, past Hanover, past Hameln, to an elegant spa town called Bad Pyrmont.

The Montezuma, New Mexico, hotel and hot springs, 1888.

Dana Chase, Courtesy of Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 56980.

A
hundred and twenty-odd years later, I followed in Julia’s and Bertha’s footsteps—this time seeking not a cure , but a ghost. I boarded a plane, not a train, to Bad Pyrmont, and it wasn’t July but late October—low season. Like Bertha, however, I brought my mother—not because she suffered from any noticeable neurasthenic ailment, but because she speaks German.

My mother was a good sport in abetting my quest for Julia. She thought my ghost-hunting efforts amusing, if silly. It was the search for my father’s German family history that lay closer to her heart. She had studied German for many years as a young woman. I had studied it for a few weeks when I was in kindergarten and had learned only to count to six. So I deputized her as my translator and travel companion and dragged her along on my hunt. Our first task was to meet a local historian named Manfred Willeke.

Herr Willeke—we never addressed each other by first name—lived in Lügde, Julia’s Lügde, which was only a few kilometers from Bad Pyrmont. By happy coincidence, he was the designated historian for both cities, and he agreed to help me trace Julia’s path in both. Arranging to meet with Herr Willeke had had its roadblocks, however: he spoke little English, and I spoke even less German. After making contact, I wrote an email to him in English confirming our appointment. He responded in German, asking why I insisted on visiting on a day when he was busy. “Why have you not taken this into account?” he wrote. “It is a pity that apparently everything is so strange and does not seem to fit when I wanted so much to help you. . . . I doubt that we’ll see you at all.”

“No, no!” I wrote back, in German this time, with the help of my mother. “I’ll come whenever you can see me!” Our relations from then on were quite cordial, provided they were in German. He signed his emails thus:
Herzliche Grüße aus dem Tal der sprudelnden Quellen
—Warm greetings from the valley of bubbling springs. The valley of Bad Pyrmont—Lügde’s valley, Julia’s valley: what a lovely spot it portended.

Germany had never before appealed to me as a vacation destination. I always pictured a gray and industrial landscape, flattened by war and brutalized by modernity. My mother’s father, a Baltimore Jew of eastern European ancestry who had watched the Holocaust from
afar in horror, disapproved of all things German. My grandfather refused to buy German cars, or chocolate, or anything else from that hated place, and he tried, rather pointedly, to steer my mother from studying German in high school—he urged her to take French.

But she loved the solidity of the German language—the clear and structured grammar, the way the words were contained in little consonantal boxes. And it was also a not-too-dramatic way to prove herself a rebel. So she went ahead and studied German in high school, and then in college, and when she graduated she moved to Germany. Back home in the States, my mother studied yet more German in graduate school, reading Lessing, Goethe, Rilke, and Brecht in the music of their own language. My own act of rebellion, perhaps—a very small one of many I inflicted on my mother—was to have no interest in anything remotely German
or
Jewish. Until this ghost hunt.

I left home with some trepidation. I was excited to learn about my family, but also nervous that I would find no information at all about Julia and Abraham and the world in which they had grown up. It would also be the longest time I had been away from my children, then five and two years old. Of course the journey was nothing like what Julia had undertaken when her children were similar ages—no stagecoaches or trains or weeks-long steamer journeys across the ocean, leaving some of her children with nannies, taking others with her.

But Herr Willeke was right. There are lovely spots in Germany—many of them. The countryside there has a restrained and tended beauty—the towns and cities, too, with their meticulous flower boxes and carefully considered architecture. Bad Pyrmont, in 2012, wasn’t all that different in appearance from the high-baroque city that Julia had visited more than a century earlier. It was a lovely, well-ordered town, full of old colonnaded buildings and cobbled roads. Square neoclassical hotels lined the streets, along with ornately gabled boardinghouses, all quite grand, if slightly gone to seed. Elderly German
“healthwalkers”—angular and white-haired, in brimmed hats and beige parkas—promenaded carefully along the wide boulevards, past the doctors’ offices cum gymnasiums, and through the enormous baroque
Kurpark
at the edge of the city center, the gardens all soothing straight lines and symmetry: flower beds, ponds, arched bridges, weeping trees, palm gardens, topiary, a moated castle. “Mental health is body health,” we read on a placard.

It wasn’t hard to picture Julia and Bertha wandering the same wide, well-tended paths, seeking health and consolation in the manicured woods of the
Kurpark
—another mother and daughter trying to reconnect, each in her own way, to a diffident
Mutterland
. On our first night, my mother and I wandered the restaurant district browsing menus. It was a homecoming, of sorts, for both of us—my mother trying to recapture her fluency in German and relive her student years there, me trying to understand the world my ancestors had inhabited so many years before. We were having fun, my mother and I, and it made me feel even more poignantly how the pages turned toward the end of Bertha’s diary, the time ticking down toward Julia’s decline and death five years hence.

Though Bad Pyrmont had once attracted tourists from all over the world, it mainly hosted elderly Germans now, big-boned and red-cheeked. We stood out: my olive-skinned and petite Jewish mother, with a dramatic streak of gray-white hair framing her face and matching gray glasses, and me, slightly fairer, taller, an American mishmash of culture and blood. We wandered past German restaurants, generally empty, a few Italian places, generally packed, and a Greek restaurant, where we ate food that resembled a German fantasy of Mediterranean cuisine: feta cheese, but also cabbage and the ubiquitous
Schwein
in various configurations. Julia and Bertha wouldn’t have known what to do with such crossbred cuisine.

After dinner, we wandered into a
Nachtclub
where a band was playing,
though I thought at first it was a karaoke act. A doughy German woman with black-dyed hair belted out a disco version of “Volare” to the graying crowd, and she harmonized not altogether well with a Turkish fellow in loose soccer clothes. Phantoms of smoke furled at eye level. The city was so well preserved, in both its architecture and its intent, that I half expected Bertha and Julia to wander in and perch full-skirted at the next table, expressing their displeasure with the barbaric harmonies coming from the stage.

Julia had gone to Bad Pyrmont to heal; I’d come there to discover what inside Julia was broken. While I wasn’t sure what I could learn, the city, with its old cobbles and healthwalkers and pedimented buildings, made it easy to dwell in the past. With Bertha’s diary in hand, I half lived there already. Our hotel, the Fürstenhof, helped in this regard. A yellow, block-long early baroque establishment, the Fürstenhof had stood just off the city’s main square since 1777 and felt little changed: threadbare carpet, peeling paint, rickety elevators, surly front-desk employees. It was, like everything in Bad Pyrmont, elegant if spartan and a bit bedraggled. But there was a familiarity to it—from knowing that it had been there when Julia visited, and that my great- and great-great-grandmothers may have dined in the same hotel restaurant where we planned to eat breakfast with Herr Willeke the next morning.

We did eat breakfast with Herr Willeke the next morning, though only after further miscommunication—we waited to meet in the lobby, he in the breakfast room. Herr Willeke was in his mid-forties, but his hair was already white, thick, and arranged in a neat pompadour. He wore a navy blazer with a pocket square and an open-collared shirt, and there was an antiquarian sense of displacement about him—as if he, too, inhabited the past. He ushered us into a 1959 Audi that had been his father’s, and drove us up above the springs to the town archives. Herr Willeke spoke briskly, turning around frequently
as he drove to make sure I was listening. My mother translated furiously from the front seat while I sat white-knuckled in the back, willing Herr Willeke’s eyes back on the road. He wove the Audi through the ever-narrower streets that climbed from the city center and stopped, finally, at a neo-Gothic spire: the town library.

Herr Willeke took out a large set of keys and ushered us in. The archives resided at the tippy-top of the tower, and we curved up an elaborately vaulted spiral staircase plastered with German Harry Potter posters until we arrived at a sunlit room that smelled of old papers. Herr Willeke extracted from the shelves a large bound book containing many years’ worth of the city’s
Kurliste
—the daily “cure list” for the spa.

I knew that Julia and Bertha had traveled to Bad Pyrmont in July. “Left for Pyrmont July 1,” Bertha had written in her diary. So we pulled out the book that covered the summer of 1891 and began leafing through brittle pages that listed each visitor’s name, date of arrival, place of origin, and place of lodging. The guests mostly came from Germany—Berlin, Bremen, Hanover, Munich, Düsseldorf—but also from Chicago, New York, and St. Louis. In the July 15 edition, across from advertisements for Suchard Chocolat and Leibig’s Fleisch-Extract—drinkable beef syrup imported from Uruguay—we found
Frau und Fräulein Staab
, hailing from
Neu-Mexico
. Julia had arrived in Bad Pyrmont, and was there, lurking in those pages, waiting to be healed. And I realized that I was hoping, somehow, that she could be.

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.