The Richest Woman in America (17 page)

This was the place that had three streets—Henry, Atkinson, and Green—named after Edward’s family; where Edward’s great-grandfather, and now he, owned the first covered toll bridge across the Connecticut River and collected the fares from carriages traveling between New Hampshire and Vermont; where his father, Henry Atkinson Green, had owned Hill and Green’s, the general store at the center of Union Street on the Square and where Henry helped found the Bellows Falls Bank; and where Edward’s widowed mother, Anna Tucker Green, now resided, regaling her friends with stories of her millionaire son.

For years the people of Bellows Falls had heard the tales of Edward Henry Green and his worldwide travels. They knew of his huge success, took pleasure in seeing him on his occasional visits home, enjoyed his gifts and his gab. They smiled at his bulldog and his bulging wardrobe of more than thirty suits and were bemused by his Japanese valet, who brushed and pressed all his clothes. They knew of his generosity toward his parents: they heard about the munificent sums he mailed them, which his father sometimes refused because they were too much; they saw the sable furs he gave his mother and the minks he gave his sister; they visited the small, sweet house on Henry Street
that he bought for the widowed Anna, and admired the objects he had sent from the East to furnish it, like the blue and white Canton china and the work stand with dragon feet, festooned with gold.

For the past seven years they had heard from the elder Mrs. Green about her son’s millionaire wife. They had read the newspaper accounts of Hetty Robinson and the Howland Will Case. Now when Henry’s mother told them her son was coming home with her famous daughter-in-law and grandchildren, they shivered with excitement. Merchants envisioned their most expensive goods flying off the shelves and into the basket of the new Mrs. Green; lawyers pictured themselves pleading her cases in court; ladies floated in daydreams of new dresses they would wear when she invited them to tea; children held out their hands pretending to catch the coins she would sprinkle around the town.

Expectations rose with each letter Edward wrote home from England. Hetty’s name was well known; that she was Mrs. Edward Green made her something of a folk hero even before she stepped onto the platform. But the whiff of riches and royalty that came from Edward hardly fit his plebeian wife. The starched and flounced crowd waiting to greet her gave an almost audible gasp when, disheveled and layered in dust, she emerged from the train. The residents may have dreamed of a princess swooping down on Bellows Falls, but what they saw was a stepdaughter covered in soot. Nothing disappointed the villagers as much as Hetty’s arrival. Her appearance augured an uneasy relationship with the town.

As pleased as she may have been to return to New England, which she preferred over New York, Hetty’s disenchantment was just as great. After the family deaths, the wills, the accusations of forgery, and the persistent sense that people hungered after her fortune, she had enjoyed her anonymity in England. After years of taking orders from Aunt Sylvia, she had finally experienced independence in London. She had run her household with a free hand and paid the bills with a purse full of Edward’s money. Now they were to make their home with their two children under her mother-in-law’s roof. Once again, as she had in New Bedford, Hetty would have to evade the public’s envy, and once again she would have to bow to another woman’s demands. Worse, Edward’s purse had shrunk with his Wall Street
losses. Hetty simmered with resentment, and her paranoia seemed to return.

Just as she had argued with her aunt over domestic expenses, now she quarreled with Edward’s mother, and had little patience with Mary, the Irish maid. When, at their first meal in the house, Mary presented herself with her black hair curled and her uniform starched and ruffled, Hetty saw it as frivolous. The churchgoing Anna Green, who played the organ at Immanuel Episcopal, was too extravagant, she said. Hetty set her frugal mind to lowering the household costs and turned on Edward to lower his style of living. Hetty felt that the merchants sometimes raised their prices, the lawyers sometimes raised their rates, and the doctors sometimes increased their fees when they knew she was the customer. Wary of the men who ran the general store and certain they tried to overcharge the maid, she refused to let Mary go shopping in town and insisted instead on sending a friend or going herself.

Once more, as they had in New Bedford, ugly rumors mottled her path. It was true that Hetty skimped in her spending, but instead of calling her frugal, gossips clucked their tongues and called her mean. When her milliner made her first trip to New York, Hetty gave her the name of a restaurant in Washington Square that charged ten cents for a plate of soup “good and thick on the bottom” or the same low price for “well-cooked oatmeal with real milk.” Instead of thanking her for the advice, the woman mocked her for being cheap. When her cleaning lady gave birth to a son, Hetty gave her a gold piece and told her to deposit it in the bank. Keep it there until he is twenty-one, she advised. Instead of understanding the lesson of compound interest, the woman scorned her for saving instead of spending.

Stories spread that, with six year-old Ned and three-year-old Sylvie by her side, she bought sacks of broken graham crackers from the grocer Patrick Keane, asked the butcher for free bones for the dog, and bargained over a peck of potatoes at the store on Westminster Street. But at least one clerk who waited on her in the general store swore that she never haggled. “Watch your pennies and the dollars will take care of themselves,” she often told her children in thrifty New England style. S. J. Cray, who owned the fish and meat market, admitted she was a regular customer, but said she was no different from most. Years
later, when Mr. Cray’s son earned his way to millionaire status, the townsfolk smiled at his rumpled suits and hats and his reputation for being a tightwad; but they frowned when they mentioned Hetty.

Hetty prided herself on her bargaining skills. After a few jaunts in Edward’s fringe-covered brougham, she prevailed on him to sell the fancy carriage and found a smaller cart for sale. Using the skills she had learned from her father, she discovered a man who had a grudge against its owner and convinced him to tell her every fault of the horse and rig. And then she approached the seller. “With the knowledge I gained I succeeded in depreciating the owner’s opinion of his property,” she explained, bringing his price down even lower than what she would have been willing to pay. She bought the old horse and worn-out wagon for less than half the $200 he initially asked.

Whether it was a horse and buggy or stocks and bonds, her canny habit of investigating every possible facet before she bought helped make her successful. “Before deciding on an investment, I seek out every kind of information about it,” she said. But her methods enraged those who hoped she would spread her wealth with a blind and generous hand. Worse, she embarrassed her mother-in-law, who seethed as Hetty usurped her position in the house and undermined her standing in Bellows Falls. The millionaire daughter-in-law who was supposed to raise her status with her friends instead made her feel like a fool.

While Anna Green suffered Hetty with indignation, others enjoyed her as a friend. Solon Goodridge, who had introduced Hetty and Edward, lived in Brooklyn and summered in Bellows Falls; so, too, did his daughter Mary, who had married Herbert Bancroft just a month before the Greens were wed. Hetty was also close to Mr. and Mrs. James Williams, head of the Bellows Falls bank, and to Cynthia Nims, a longtime friend of Edward’s.

Edward’s niece Agnes Elmendorf, eldest of his sister’s twelve children, had moved back from the Midwest, graduated from the local high school in 1874, and worked as a teacher in town. Eighteen-year-old Agnes, the only one of her siblings living in Bellows Falls, cared more about being close to her family than being close to their fortune. Hetty treated her kindly. But almost everyone else, she believed, was after her money; she was always grateful to those who were friendly to her just for herself. She shared stories with Agnes of life in London,
Paris, and New York, and invited the young woman to visit them at home.

After Edward’s mother died in the summer of 1875, the Greens sat down to dinner one day at a dining room table set only with simple kitchenware instead of Anna’s elaborate crystal, silver, and china. When Edward questioned his wife about his mother’s belongings, she told him she had packed them up and put them away. The usually mild-tempered Edward took the goblet in his hand and threw it against the dining room wall. Then he stood up and left.

The next two months were tense as Edward’s investments turned sour. The Bank of California had borrowed money from the London and San Francisco Bank and used it recklessly. In August, when the California bank declared itself in default and its president drowned himself in the ocean, its huge loans were revealed, and depositors made a run on the bank. The directors of the London and San Francisco were responsible for covering the losses, and Edward, still on the board, was caught short. As a wave of defaults struck the state, the value of his holdings declined, and his mining stocks, bought on margin, suddenly dropped. Edward looked to his wife for help, and although she rebuked him for his risky speculations, Hetty gave him a lifeline.

Salvation had its revenge. That winter, before they left for New York, Hetty asked Agnes Elmendorf for her help: she wanted to open the crates holding her mother-in-law’s belongings. The young woman yearned for some of her grandmother’s objects. But instead of offering them to Agnes and her family, Hetty announced she was putting everything up at auction. A shocked and saddened Agnes refused to assist her. But the gavel banged fast as the townsfolk bid at the sale.

In return for rescuing Edward, Hetty reckoned she was owed more than just the few dollars brought in at the auction: she was named an executor of his mother’s estate. It was not the only time they made this kind of arrangement. “Hetty went in and saved him three or four times,” said a stockbroker friend. “She would lecture him about the chances he was taking, but time after time the turn in the market confirmed his judgment. He disobeyed her once too often, though, and she got rid of him.” But that would come later. For now they were still Mr. and Mrs. Edward Green, and despite the disagreements, their marriage remained intact.

W
orried over Wall Street, the Greens left Bellows Falls to spend part of the winter of 1875 in New York, starting a pattern they repeated for years. Edward had business meetings with colleagues at his club; Hetty had business to take care of downtown. While Edward dined with his friends and chewed over ideas for investing, Hetty journeyed to Wall Street on the horse-drawn omnibus. On one occasion she trundled down with a satchel stuffed with $200,000 worth of bonds and handed them over to John Cisco. Her banker admonished her for carrying negotiable securities on public transportation. “It’s dangerous,” he told her. “You should have taken a carriage.” Hetty shot him a look with her steely eyes and replied, “A carriage, indeed! Perhaps you can afford to ride in a carriage—I cannot.”

All was not business for the Greens: New York offered a wonderland for adults and children alike. At the American Museum of Natural History, founded by Pierpont Morgan, Moses Grinnell, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and others, wide-eyed youngsters could encounter specimens of twelve thousand birds, one thousand mammals, and three thousand reptiles and fish. In one room an Armenian camel proudly showed off his humps, a Nova Scotia moose glared from his girth, and a Rocky Mountain deer posed between them. Buffaloes, monkeys, and grizzly bears stood in another hall alongside rats, bats, and other rodents. A third room held a collection of shells, donated by Hetty’s friend Catherine Lorillard Wolfe. The quiet Miss Wolfe gave
millions of dollars to religious and educational institutions and to the arts: she supported the Episcopal Church in America; the Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Egypt; the Protestant Church in Paris; and the American School in Athens, Greece. She underwrote archaeological explorations in Babylonia, helped homeless children in Manhattan, gave land for a hospital in the Bronx, and bequeathed her paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.