American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (28 page)

The Staab House, shortly before the third story burned in 1924.

Courtesy of La Posada de Santa Fe.

A
fter Arthur’s trial concluded, the news stories about the family trailed off. There were no Staabs left in Santa Fe. Julia, Abraham, and Julius were dead; the girls had married out of the name and moved to larger cities; Paul had relocated to Albuquerque to be closer to his sisters; Arthur was banished; Teddy, Julius’s fortune in hand, was off collecting art. Santa Fe still held the state capital, but everything
else was happening in Albuquerque. It was a different kind of town—sprawling across the Rio Grande, hemmed in by nothing, ruled by no one. If the Staab name appeared in the newspaper, it was now in the service of nostalgia, tidbits in the Twenty Years Ago column. This is how we fade from the world.

In 1920, Teddy and the sisters put the house on the market. “For Sale,” the
New Mexican
announced, “The ‘Staab’ Mansion on Palace Avenue. Beautiful fifteen room residence with all modern conveniences, two story brick garage and living quarters, summer-house, fruit and shade trees, lawn, iron fence and paved street. Could not be duplicated for $50,000. Priced for Quick Sale, $20,000.” It was still on the market in July 1921, now at a “bargain.” It sold later that year to a man named L. E. Elliot, who planned to convert it into a high-class apartment building “or family hotel where wealthy tourists may find a delightful home to spend weeks or months in Santa Fe.” People didn’t know much about the place anymore: it was, the paper reported forty years after its construction, “built perhaps 20 years ago.” Elliot turned it into a boardinghouse; he painted the red brick a cream color, the ironwork gray, and opened Julia’s home to the world.

Early one morning three years later, a neighbor woke abruptly at two in the morning when his pony kicked down its stable doors in fright. Smoke was billowing from the back of the Staab home. The entire fire department—both engines—rushed to the scene. The flames had spread through the second story following the electrical wires—the conflagration had started in a switch box. It had crept up to the third story through the iron-sided air chambers between the original home and an annex added to the back, and burst out of the walls with sudden violence—exploding like a grenade, the newspaper reported. The city’s former fire chief entered a room on the third floor and, seeing no signs of fire or smoke, opened a drawer in a built-in cupboard
on the wall. A belch of flames shot out like an explosion, knocking him across the room and singeing his hair and eyebrows.

It was a “stubborn fire,” the fire chief told the
New Mexican
. It took dozens of firefighters until morning to bring the flames under control. For more than six hours, firemen doused the structure with thousands of gallons of water, which poured through the ceilings to the lower floor. They pulled out what furniture they could and piled it on the lawns—walnut mirrors, bureaus, and chairs, much of it original furniture sold with the house. But other pieces remained inside. “A grand piano in the parlor to the left of the entrance was too heavy to move and it stood there,” reported the paper the day after, “resounding to the patter of drops falling from the water-soaked ceiling.” Oriental carpets, lace and damask curtains, tapestry-covered divans, Venetian glass chandeliers were all ruined. “Only the charred remains of much of this finery was visible to the eye today.” The house suffered its own death.

And then, a resurrection of sorts. The third story was gone, entirely, and the newspaper speculated that Elliot wouldn’t be able to keep the second story intact, either—that it would become a one-story dwelling like all the others in New Mexico, its grandeur flattened to desert scale. But Elliot managed to restore the second floor in the front part of the house. Julia’s room, and Abraham’s, next door, survive today.

Elliot held on to the home until the Great Depression; he lost it to foreclosure in 1934. It was owned by a bank for three years until a buyer was found: R. H. Nason, a collector of Southwestern art. Nason plastered stucco over Abraham’s painstakingly assembled brick walls—that native mud that Abraham had worked so hard to surmount. He softened Abraham’s straight lines, built a batch of small adobe casitas in the gardens, and turned the place into a motor lodge—La Posada, place of rest. The lodge hosted a summer arts school and retreat. There were two dance studios, along with facilities for tennis, swimming, badminton, and archery. Weddings—of strangers—were held there.
Santa Fe was becoming a place people visited for a holiday, to take in the old Spanish and Indian folkways and absorb the great American Southwest. There was no room on the premises for the memory of merchant princes or their wives.

The family who had once lived there also passed from the scene. Paul, the epileptic son, had died in early 1915, a few months after Arthur’s verdict; Anna died in 1929 at age sixty-two; Bertha in 1933, at sixty-three, of a heart attack during an afternoon nap at her summer home in the mountains where I first read Lizzie’s book and Bertha’s diary.

Arthur lived another couple of decades—he died in Los Angeles in 1952, at the age of seventy-nine. There was no mention, in New Mexico, of his passing. And Delia lived into her eighties. She moved with her husband to Boston, where he worked for a firm that turned Southwestern wool into Eastern money. The family owned a large home in Brookline, and another at Manchester-by-the-Sea. Delia’s gardens at the coast were splendid—she had inherited Julia’s passion for gardening. When young relatives visited, Delia set them to work deadheading her rhododendrons—every day, no exceptions.

She was exacting, relatives told me, short and wide and fearsome. The bathroom towels in both of Delia’s homes were changed twice a day, and each morning she lined up her maids in their black dresses and white aprons and gloves, put on white gloves of her own, and ran her fingers along the baseboards and molding, hunting for stray specks of dust.

After her husband died in 1935, Delia moved into the Braemore, a fashionable hotel in Boston, visiting New Mexico from time to time in the summer—there was always a big to-do when she arrived. But she was in her Boston hotel room when, on a December Saturday in 1951, she was found dead by her maid. It was not a gentle taking of leave. “The nude body of an elderly, wealthy widow, her throat slashed, was
found Saturday in the bathroom of her suite in Hotel Braemore,” reported a Montana newspaper. “Police said a knife was found near the body.” She was facedown in a pool of blood.

I had assumed, after reading the newspaper account, that Delia had been murdered. In her book, Lizzie wrote that Delia had been stabbed in the “bosom.” But then I had lunch with her grandson, a literary agent named Tom Wallace who lived in New York. We convened at the Century Association, a bookish private club full of leather furniture, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, and besuited New Yorkers—an uptown crowd. Tom was a member. He was in his late seventies, his hair only slightly grayed, his eyes dark-rimmed. He wore a gray flannel suit. His voice was lettered, each syllable distinctly pronounced, each vowel drawn out, a hint of New York in his A’s and O’s. As our drinks arrived, he told me, as others had, of Delia’s flower gardens and the maids in their black-and-white uniforms, and of Delia checking for dust—for specks of disorder, Abraham’s and Julia’s Germanic rigidity still extant. Delia’s table was always formal, he said: lobster thermidor, floating islands. She was philanthropic. Louis Brandeis, the Supreme Court justice, had been her lawyer. And Tom was certain, he said, as our sandwiches arrived and crowded our small oak table, that Delia hadn’t been murdered.

Rather, she had committed suicide, just as her brother Julius had—and just as Tom’s mother had, jumping from the window of her seventh-story apartment in Manhattan. He was convinced that Julia had also died this way. “That’s what we were told,” he said. The ice lurched in my Arnold Palmer.

The women in his family killed themselves. Men, too. It was a pattern, Tom believed—this was what Arthur had tried to explain in his lawsuit, about the “taint of insanity” that ran through the family. The psychologists call it “normalization”: once a family has experienced suicide, it tends to happen again. It is a more insidious sort of inheritance.
Julia taught Delia, who taught her own daughter—who was also named Julia.

So Tom and his family believed that his great-grandmother Julia had run up against her own despair and committed suicide—he didn’t speculate on how she might have done it—and that Delia had, too. The parallels weren’t specific: Julia had died in middle age, while Delia had outlived her husband and her once robust health. She had lost money to a Ponzi scheme after the war and was suffering the afflictions of old age. She was losing her sight, along with her money. So she decided to cut her neck.

Later, I searched old editions of Boston newspapers from 1951, and discovered, in the
Boston Traveler
, that “Mrs. Baer had been under treatment recently for a nervous condition.” In the
Boston American
, I learned that the coroner had ruled Delia’s wounds “self-inflicted and consistent with suicide.”

It seemed a powerful exertion for an eighty-three-year-old woman—cutting one’s own neck. But perhaps she, too, was haunted.

Teddy—our pun-loving, art-collecting, nude-cavorting gay uncle—was the last to go. He died at the age of ninety-three in 1968, about three months after I was born—our final link to Julia. In Jewish tradition, it is said that we die twice. Once when we take our last breath, and again the last time somebody speaks our name.

For many years, the family continued to appear in legal notices in the papers, named in lawsuits against Abraham’s heirs for his role in New Mexico real estate grabs fifty, a hundred years before. The cases went on for decades: eighty years after Julia’s death, her dead children were still being named as defendants. Finally, the lawsuits went away, too. There was no one left to sue.

Soul piled on soul in that harsh country of serial conquest—Indian,
Spanish, Anglo, Jew. Story piled upon story: land taken and sold away, lives interrupted and truths lost, faith and superstition and sun and shadow.

It was not until a few years after Teddy’s death that there was any mention of a ghost at the Staab home. Not until 1975 did the newspapers discuss anything of a spectral nature in Julia’s house, and when first they did, there was no indication whose ghost, exactly, it might be. “Up Palace Avenue a way at the famous La Posada, once the home of the prominent Staab family, the dining room . . . is said to be haunted,” wrote the
New Mexican
.

Maids and waitresses never see the ghost there, but sometimes, when they are setting up or clearing after a private party or club meeting, they are puzzled or frightened. There is the sound of wind, as soft as a summer breeze, but as cold and cutting as the worst blizzard. It raises goose bumps and hair on the nape of the neck. Then it is gone. If decorative candles have been left burning they go out and a few wisps of smoke rise slowly, naturally and disappear. A long ago hostess or housekeeper anxious that everything be exactly right? No one seems to know. No sightings, no sounds save the soft whisper of wind and the intense momentary cold.