American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest (10 page)

Archbishop Lamy helped Julia plant those apricot trees, which long outlived them both. In the gardens at La Posada, one tree still stands, the one my children climbed—three thick limbs, gnarled and dendritic, braiding over and through the adobe wall and roof of one of the casitas. A plaque leans into a particularly large and impressive knot near its base: “In the 1880’s,” it reads, “this apricot tree was planted by Julia Staab and her dear friend, Archbishop Lamy. They were avid gardeners and together planted all of the other large fruit trees on the grounds of La Posada de Santa Fe.”

Abraham and the archbishop were friends. They shared an interest in the civic improvement of Santa Fe, and they worked together to bring the railroad as well as the sidewalks and gaslights. They constructed monuments to their beliefs—a cathedral for one, a private mansion for the other—and strove, side by side, to impose a European sense of order on their adopted city. But it seems that there was a different kind of friendship between the archbishop and our displaced Jewish bride. It was a native sympathy, built on quieter tasks and more delicate sensibilities.

This was the relationship that Lamy’s biographer Paul Horgan described in another book he wrote about the Southwest,
The Centuries of
Santa Fe
, published in 1956. In one chapter of that book, he tells of the friendship between the archbishop and an unnamed German Jewish woman. The chapter is titled “The German Bride,” and its first page is illustrated with a drawing of a three-story Victorian home, surrounded by deciduous trees and a tall wrought-iron fence. It is the precise image of Abraham and Julia’s home.

The German bride was, in Horgan’s depiction, an exquisite and dignified creature in a rugged outpost starved for urbanity. My family loved that bride, who seemed to have floated right out of a Western. “Her skin was white,” Horgan wrote. “Her clothes were beautifully made in the highest of fashion. She animated them with something of the effect of a small girl dressed up playing queen. She could make everybody smile simply on meeting them. Wait till she played the piano for them, and then she would make them sigh, or even weep. Her Mendelssohn—they would never believe it.”

The German bride was a consummate hostess, as Julia might have been on her good days. Horgan describes elaborate formal affairs in the bride’s mansard-roofed home, and afternoon teas in the mansion’s yellow-silk drawing room, and dinners at a table set with “European china, cut glass, silver, lace, and linen.” There were visits from Rutherford Hayes; Generals Nelson Miles, Philip Sheridan, and William Tecumseh Sherman; and once, the “notorious philosopher Robert G. Ingersoll”—a famous agnostic.

The bride entertained the archbishop on a regular basis. “She would find in him a friend,” Horgan wrote. The two seemed to understand each other, their “distinct sophistication” and European sensibilities. “She always enjoyed her little exchanges with the bishop . . . ,” Horgan explained.

Her education was excellent, and she spoke a social kind of French, so that when they met she engaged the bishop in his own early language.
He replied in kind, amused to speak the language in which he still realized much of his thought.

Abraham had left Germany of his own accord, willingly, forcefully. Julia and the archbishop had arrived in Santa Fe under higher orders—Lamy’s from the church, Julia’s because of the husband she had sworn to obey. And the longing for home never left the archbishop or the German bride. They never quite adapted, in Horgan’s estimation, to the high seasoning of the food, or the high drama of the landscape and people around them. Lamy and Julia were both avid gardeners. Lamy, accustomed to the innumerable greens of the Limagne Plain where he had grown up—the yellow-green grasses, the silvered willows, the near-black hearts of the poplar stands—never grew to love the desert reds and buffs and taupes and tans. Julia, too, favored the gentler, more generous blooms of her childhood home.

When Lamy first came to New Mexico, he carried cuttings from France, and each time he traveled to Europe, he brought back more—peaches, pears, oxheart cherry, fall and winter apple; seeds of cabbages, turnips, and beets; muscat and Malaga and Gamay and Catawba grapes hauled in buckets of water across the ocean and the plains. He planted them behind the parish church that would be replaced, eventually, by his new cathedral. The garden was his only personal indulgence—his only visible one, anyway. It was five acres, an adobe-walled garden with a fountain, a sundial, aisles of trees, formal walks, shaded benches, and a spring-fed pond with water lilies and trout. He brought shrubs and vines and shade trees with him, too, thousands of them, chestnuts and elms, locusts and osier willows, that he transplanted along the Plaza and the streets that radiated out to mountain and desert.

Some of those cuttings also found their way into Julia’s garden. Transplanted themselves to an odd and barren land, Lamy and Julia
performed their own acts of reclamation, irrigating those things that couldn’t survive without intervention, softening their new city’s stark splendor. Daguerreotypes from the 1850s show a dusty stretch of plaza, bereft of vegetation. But by the 1880s, there was bountiful shade from the trees Lamy had imported. This desert did not grow green on its own; it required nourishment. In Lamy’s hands, even the most delicate varieties flourished.

Nor was gardening the only affinity between the archbishop and the German bride. There was the love of European architecture, the conversational French. They were also both often unwell. Julia’s mental and physical health was tenuous, as we know; the archbishop, too, was “always ill,” according to Horgan. He was bled twice, Horgan reported, and treated fifteen times with leeches on the abdomen. His mental state also seemed incongruously fragile “within his square peasant frame,” Horgan wrote. Lamy was nervous; there was a darkness within him. He had a tendency to collapse into himself and withdraw from the world. Of course, Julia did as well.

There was a kinship between the archbishop and Julia—a connection.

Grandma Ginny.

Family collection, 1937.

M
y grandmother Ginny was once a new bride in New Mexico, too, and she also speculated on the relationship between Julia and Archbishop Lamy. Ginny was my sole non-Jewish grandparent—a Westchester County WASP who met my grandfather at a Yale football game in the days of raccoon coats. After they married in 1935, he drove her to her new home in New Mexico. In an essay she wrote called “The New Bride,” she compared Julia’s experience as an imported wife with
her own. In the essay, she describes her arrival in Albuquerque for the first time, and feeling violently out of place in that desiccated land. The road signs on Route 66 had advertised “the promised land for 500 barren miles,” Ginny wrote, “and sign by sign I envisioned a beautiful oasis on the banks of the fabled Rio Grande.”

But then the pavement turned to gravel, and Ginny saw Albuquerque in all its taupe and stony severity. “I was appalled,” she wrote, “to put it politely.” She had never seen such dust. Ginny was an up-to-the-minute woman, in knee skirts and shoulder pads, finger-waved curls crimped below her ears; such fashions hadn’t yet arrived in New Mexico. At a tea party given in her honor, she was told “in no uncertain terms” that she should wear a long dress. “I rebelled but finally accepted the inevitable. I scraped to the bottom of my trousseau trying to find something suitable, but nobody at B. Altman’s had foreseen that I would be expected to wear a long dress . . . when the temperature was 101 degrees.”

All went well, Ginny wrote, until the plates were cleared away and the men lit up their cigars. “There wasn’t a breath of fresh air, the red velvet drapes were closely drawn, the temperature still hovering around one hundred, and the spoiled New Bride, never having been exposed to such heat or to men who smoked cigars,” plunged out the front door, she wrote, “and vomited quite thoroughly, trying not to spatter my dress or shoes. Between heaves I hung on to the trunk of a small sapling.” Like Julia, Ginny was a woman of sensitive constitution stranded among men of business and left to her own sometimes insufficient resources. It was not easy to be a new bride in New Mexico—not in 1866, not in 1935.

Nor was it easy to be a mother and aging wife so far from home. I like to think that there was a time when my grandparents were happy—but all I know for certain is that in the end they were miserable. After thirty-five years, the marriage dissolved in a noxious stew of
alcohol and anger. My grandfather remarried the day after the divorce came through, and Ginny retreated, at age sixty, to the brackish, bug-stippled pond in Rhode Island where she had spent summers as a child, and where she lived in a house on stilts. She vacationed on cruise ships, drove a Buick convertible, and maintained an excellent suntan. She drank coffee with her pinkie pointing skyward; at noon she switched to vodka. Ginny felt that she had lost much to those long decades in the desert—her youth, equanimity, and good humor. She never remarried. After her death we found a raft of poems that suggested there had been a great love in her life (“I write to you so often / In letters never shown”) and that he was not my grandfather.

No wonder Ginny’s writing about Julia seeped disappointment and longing. “I often wonder about the German Bride,” she wrote, reflecting on Horgan’s chapter on Julia. “Was she always so gracious and charming, the perfect lady? Wouldn’t she have been annoyed by the rasping of frontier fiddles, condescending toward the provincial theatricals, bored with the literary pretensions of the exclusive Ladies Reading Society?” Ginny aired “other speculations” about Julia, as well. “Did she really continue to adore with undeviating devotion her entrepreneur husband who got her into this mess in the first place?” she wrote. My grandmother clearly hadn’t continued to adore her own entrepreneur husband.

Ginny had written this essay before the family learned about Julia’s ghost, but she, too, projected onto Julia her own preoccupations. For me as a younger woman, Julia’s story was about women professionally and politically oppressed; for Lynne and Joanna, it involved cruel husbands. For Ginny, I suspect, it reflected the horror of marrying the wrong person—and then learning, perhaps, that the right one was nearby, yet painfully out of reach. “When a young French priest arrived,” Ginny wrote about Julia, “the young bride and the young bishop had much in common.”

The properties of The Mansion, her residence, and The Manse, his, adjoined. They had walks and talks, always in cultured French that nobody else could understand, between the two establishments. She would admire his gardens and flowers, he would inspect his orchard, the pears and peaches and apricots that he had imported from his French homeland. He would pick the perfect ones for her to sample and they would rest under an arbor of his favorite grapes while he recited classic French poetry.

My father and I used to joke, after Ginny died and we read through her trove of papers, that someone should write a romance novel about a German bride and a smoldering, chestnut-haired French priest. It would be a tale of ripped bodices and vestments, expensive perfume on clerical collars, and it would be called “Love Comes for the Archbishop.”

It was enticing to think of Julia as a woman of hidden passions. Perhaps, we speculated blithely, it wasn’t the plucky, bulldoggish merchant who sired our line, but instead the sinewy, blue-eyed, square-jawed archbishop of delicate sensibilities and posthumous literary fame. Maybe, we joked, we were a little bit French and a little bit Catholic, products of a peculiarly Western ghost story that was also a great love story.

There are, of course, many—many—reasons
not
to believe that the archbishop was our forebear. To start with, he was a priest. In New Mexico at the time, that did not rule out fathering an octet of children. But Lamy was not, by anyone’s accounting, dissolute: he fought hard in his early years as bishop to enforce the celibate priesthood among his fallen brothers in New Mexico. He was driven, moral, “a priest in a thousand.” Then, too, he was quite a bit older than Julia—thirty years. So he wasn’t exactly the “young French priest” that Grandma Ginny had imagined. His days of grand passion (if he’d ever had such)
were likely behind him when Julia arrived, and the long years in the desert were also not easy on his Fatherly good looks—“That country will drink up his youth and strength as it does the rain,” Cather wrote. And it did. By the end of Lamy’s life, he had lost his teeth, and his face had sunk in on itself—not the stuff of romance novels. But still!

Partly on the strength of Grandma Ginny’s speculations, and partly to satisfy my own curiosity, I decided to get a DNA test. Because unlike ghost stories, some love stories can be confirmed in the world of hard science. It is as easy as swabbing a cheek to learn of four letters, ACTG—the four base molecules of DNA—configured and reconfigured through blood and bone, past and future, to tell us who we are and where we came from.

I did some research, got online, added one (1) DNA kit to my cart, pressed Submit, waited for the kit to arrive, waited two hours after a meal, swabbed my cheek, swabbed it a second time, placed the swabs and my chromosomes in two plastic vials of liquid preservatives, wrapped them, packed them, and mailed them off to Texas.