American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus Page B
Authors: Hannah Nordhaus
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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 Juliaperformed 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.
nine
OTHER SPECULATIONS
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
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 Juliaperformed 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.
nine
OTHER SPECULATIONS
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
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