American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus Page A

rock mesas, were made to look like the rock on which they sat, were imperceptible at a distance,” Willa Cather wrote fifty years later in Death Comes for the Archbishop . “None of the pueblos would at that time admit glass windows into their dwellings. The reflection of the sun on the glazing was to them ugly and unnatural—even dangerous. . . . It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.” But Abraham wasn’t the sort to fear sleeping spirits.
    Furniture came from Europe and the East Coast. A piano traveled from Kansas City. A mezuzah was affixed to the doorframe. Workmen installed gilt floor-length mirrors. The newspaper saw fit to mention a “green sword,” perhaps a newly acquired family heirloom, that “now graces the residence of A. Staab.” On the grounds around the structure, gardens and a large orchard were planted. My grandfather, who was a child when the family sold the house, remembered that the apricot trees reached over a tall wrought-iron fence, and that the local children would shinny up to pick them.

    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 ofSanta 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