Hetty (23 page)

Edward Green’s final years were quiet and uneventful.
William Wallace Crapo, the New Bedford lawyer, politician, and businessman who spent much of his life tangled up one way or another with Hetty, saw the two of them together in New York one evening. Crapo had come from New Bedford for a meeting of the directors of a railroad. Hetty, staying temporarily at a boardinghouse in lower Manhattan, sent word to Crapo that she needed to see him on crucial business. Crapo promised to come by at the end of his business day. When he arrived, he found Edward seated quietly with Hetty in the boardinghouse’s sitting room. As Crapo took his seat, Hetty launched into a by-now familiar diatribe against the late Edward D. Mandell, the late Dr. Gordon (Aunt Sylvia’s physician and trustee), and various other New Bedford figures (all of them friends of Crapo’s) whom she considered guilty of financial wrongs. Hetty held a bible and read underlined passages that she felt forecast divine retributions on her enemies. When Crapo realized that the “important business” he’d come for amounted to another chance for Hetty to vent, he settled in and listened patiently until she cooled down.

After a while, Crapo rose to go. Edward, sensing his chance to escape back to his club, rose also. In a few moments the two old men were heading down the steps and into the night. They walked east on Eleventh Street toward Broadway to catch their respective streetcars. As Green boarded his car, he turned to Crapo and said, “Women are queer.” It struck Crapo that they were the first words Green had spoken all night.

William called after him, with a smile,
“Some
women.”

Hetty and Edward spent the summer of 1900 together in Vermont, in the Tucker House. They were there when news that put a coda on Hetty’s most bitter feud arrived. That summer, in August, Collis P. Huntington and his second wife, Arabella, boarded their private railcar for Raquette Lake, in the Adirondacks, where Huntington owned a sprawling summer home called Pine Knot Lodge, which he had built for $350,000. Still vigorous at seventy-nine and every bit as much a workaholic as
Hetty, Huntington spent the morning of August 13 doing business with his secretary, George Miles. In the afternoon, he walked around his property, then took several friends on a cruise aboard his motorboat,
Oneonta.
In the evening, the Huntingtons invited several guests from neighboring cottages for dinner. In the summertime, the health-conscious Huntington ate no meat (it was “too heating,” he said). He never smoked and preferred tea to alcohol, often boasting never to have so much as tasted strong drink until after his fiftieth birthday. About eleven o’clock, Huntington bade his guests good evening and went to bed. A short time later, Miles and Arabella heard a groan and rushed to his room to find Huntington unconscious. He died shortly before midnight. The cause of death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

Huntington’s funeral was held at his palatial Fifth Avenue home. The entire Southern Pacific system, every flatcar, passenger car, and locomotive, ground to a halt for seven minutes in his honor. Newport News, Virginia, which Huntington had transformed from a sleepy burg into one of the world’s great shipyards, ceased operation for the day. Newspaper editorials spoke of Huntington’s courage, perseverance, and energy, without reference to his duplicitous and often shady dealings with Congress, his ruthless tactics with competitors, shippers, and farmers. They praised his very real vision and steadfastness in directing an incredible project to completion.

At the Tucker House, Edward heard the news first. Then Hetty burst triumphantly into the room with a newspaper in her hand. “That old devil Huntington is dead,” she said. “Serves him right.”

Edward himself lingered for another two years, living part of the time with Hetty and part on his own. In the summer of 1901, with his health failing rapidly, Edward left for Bellows Falls for the last time. Ned sent his private railroad car from Texas to escort his father on this last journey in style. In Bellows
Falls, where Edward was still remembered fondly, visitors streamed in as he lay quietly in bed, looking out his window at the green hills that gave Vermont its name, at the gentle sweep of the Connecticut River, recalling the time when the great Jack Adams fished him out of the canal.

In early October, Green suffered a severe attack of what doctors called inflammation of the kidneys. They gave him only a few days to live. Hetty arrived from New York, joining Sylvia, who had remained by her father’s side for months. Ned came up from Texas and stayed for a few days before returning south, citing business pressures. Hetty, also reluctant to let her business concerns slip, summoned a Chemical Bank secretary and some clerks, who helped her conduct business from a room at the Tucker House. Despite the doctor’s prediction, Green revived somewhat. Hetty traveled to New York when business demanded but mostly stayed on to nurse him. She did whatever she could to keep him comfortable. With the imminent reality of death hanging over the house, a sort of tenderness returned to Hetty and Edward’s relationship. The terrific fights over money were long gone, if not entirely forgotten. They were two old people facing the end of time. Hetty would later recall the time as particularly stressful. Nearly two years after Edward’s death, when a friend from Massachusetts wrote her to complain about her own illness, Hetty, in a letter postmarked January 5, 1904, responded: “Mr. Green’s sickness & death & going up & down [from New York to Vermont] in storms and getting up three times in the night to see if the nurse was awake … I have had my troubles.”

Green died peacefully on March 19, 1902, a Wednesday. He was eighty-one years old. The examiner, A. L. Miner, determined the cause of death as chronic nephritis and heart disease. He was buried the following Saturday afternoon in the little graveyard of Immanuel Church, a stone’s throw from the Tucker House, where he joined several generations of Greens. His pallbearers included four local men and his New York doctor. Ned,
still on business in Texas, did not attend his father’s funeral. Hetty was escorted by Frank Green of Boston, one of Edward’s cousins. There were many bouquets from well-wishers, but none was more striking than Hetty’s; she had splurged on a large circle of laurel and Easter lilies. Among the other tributes was a pillow from Sylvia and Ned bearing the word “Father.”

Considering how harsh, strenuous, and limited life could be in the nineteenth century, Green had lived better than most people from Bellows Falls. Town folk who died during the same part of 1902 as Edward included a seventy-one-year-old laborer who broke his spine in a fall and a seventy-five-year-old mason who keeled over from exhaustion while working; along with three children under sixteen and five babies who died at birth. And yet for all the ease and longevity he enjoyed, there was an undeniable melancholy of having lived his life in reverse, making his fortune early and then losing everything by agonizing degrees, until he barely seemed to exist.

At the time of his death, Edward had a little over $5,500 in cash. His estate consisted of a small family house and land in Mandell, Massachusetts, his father’s hometown, valued at $1,500. Other small properties included those taken by foreclosure, most likely by Hetty, in Edward’s name. There was a watch and chain and some rings, valued at $300; and, most poignantly, an oil painting of his mother, valued at $200. In the final tally, Edward Green, who had once boasted a fortune of $750,000, was worth $24,509.75.

The
New York Times
obituary ran under the headline:

“Excepting for his distinction as the husband of the richest woman in the world, Edward Green was a figure of whom the public knew little,” the obituary noted. “He had been an invalid for many years and lived in retirement at the Green home in Bellows Falls, Vt. Even there people knew little and saw less of
him, as all business relating to the household was transacted by his wife.”

In May, less than two months after Edward’s death, Hetty, back to business in New York, walked into the Leonard Street Station of the New York Police Department, accompanied by a clerk from Chemical National Bank, and some of the ever-present cadre of reporters who followed her movements. She announced her desire for a permit to carry a pistol. She had long owned the revolver given to her as a gift by the Californian, but now she wanted to arm herself as she walked the streets.

“I am a rich woman and some people want to kill me,” Hetty told the surprised desk sergeant, Isaac Frank.

When Sergeant Frank asked her if she believed that carrying the pistol would protect her, Hetty replied, “Certainly. And I want everyone to know I have one. Those who have any knowledge of me will not doubt my ability or courage to use it.”

She added, “I can take care of myself under ordinary circumstances, but there have been so many murders of rich people that I feel I ought to be constantly on my guard.”

Hetty then completed an application form. Sergeant Frank was skeptical of Hetty’s need to bear arms; nonetheless, Hetty Green left the Leonard Street Station on May 8 the owner of pistol permit No. 13,854. The
Times
, which wrote of her application the next day, pointed out that it was rare in New York for a woman to be granted a permit to carry a revolver.

A Times reporter had followed her back to Chemical Bank, where she said, simply, “Yes, I have a revolver. And I know how to use one. I have often been threatened. People know I have money, and think I can be scared out of it. But I can’t.”

As the reporter took notes, Hetty spun out some of her more bizarre claims of threats against her life. She claimed to have been approached in New Bedford by a drunk who demanded $100,000 or would “send me out of town feet foremost as my father had been,” and outside the Hotel St. George in
Brooklyn, by a man who later shot and killed a bank president. “If he had acted in the same way toward me I would have driven a hatpin through his brain,” she said. To this she added perhaps her oddest claim to date: that Edward, six weeks dead, had been murdered. “I am satisfied that he was given an overdose of mercury,” she said. Just why someone would want to kill a dying eighty-one-year-old man with hardly any money under his own control, she didn’t say, other than to suggest that “people wanted him out of the way.”

Editorial pages took a dim view of Hetty’s permit. The
Brooklyn Daily Eagle
, which had always been among the kinder newspapers in its treatment of Hetty in the past, suggested on May 9 that her permit was symptomatic of an overgunned and slightly screwy city. “The unlawful carrying of pistols, which resulted yesterday in one murder and two suicides in this city, is winked at by the authorities,” the
Eagle
stated. “If there is a form of penalty for carrying them, there is perfect freedom to buy and sell them, and any thug or burglar can arm himself as heavily as he pleases. Mrs. Hetty Green … has applied for and obtained permission to carry a revolver, with which to shoot lawyers who may become obstreperous in her presence, or to kill people who suspect her of carrying money and jewelry about the streets. The permit should not have been issued.

“Mrs. Green is well on in years. She is suspicious and hostile. Her attitude toward the world is that it is envious and resentful, and will try to take away the wealth she hoards so earnestly. It is the wrong attitude, of course, for the world regards her merely as a curiosity. But so thinking, she is liable to put a false construction on the words and actions of her fellow creatures, and the impulse to shoot may become ungovernable.”

The editorial concluded: “This woman who believes that her father was killed and her daughter injured by lawyers, yet who constantly resorts to the law and so wearies the patience of courts that she must be regarded as a confirmed litigant, is not
the kind of person who should be intrusted [sic] with firearms.”

The
Times
took a similar, if somewhat more lighthearted tone, with an editorial ending: “The applicant did not set forth that she was an expert markswoman, although she left no doubt of her determination to use upon suitable occasions the weapon which she asked to be allowed to wear. It is rather to be hoped that the Sergeant, before he issued the permit, satisfied himself that the pistol would not go off.”

Edward’s death was followed in May 1903 by the death of George G. Williams, the courtly president of Chemical National Bank, one of the few men of finance whom Hetty liked and trusted, and who liked and understood
her.
He died of a heart disease at his home on West Fifty-eighth Street. He was seventy-seven. The death of Edward and Williams left her feeling increasingly isolated. Hetty had always feared that people were after her money or her life.

She had first vented the fears publicly during the Barling fight nearly a decade earlier. A Times reporter had followed her down Pine Street in December of 1894 and waited for her to finish doing business in a bank. He asked her plainly if the rumors were true, that she feared for her life.

“Yes, it is true,” Hetty said.

“Have you ever been approached or threatened in the street?”

“Yes, many times,” she said. “I am no enemy of the poor people—the people one ordinarily meets in the streets. They would never attack me. I could go everywhere unmolested, at all times, if it were not for the devices of people who have an interest in annoying me.”

These people, she made no secret, were “the hostile executor and trustees of my father’s estate.”

She added, “The newspapers have printed no end of stuff about my going around with a little black bag with a million or two in cash and securities in it. I am convinced that those stories
were set afloat by the people I refer to, in expectation that I should be attacked or murdered for my money.”

With that, Hetty opened her fabled black bag.

“You may see for yourself that it contains nothing but letters, the accumulation of correspondence that I get in my business affairs during the day. I always attend to my own correspondence. As a matter of fact, I never carry more than a dollar or two about with me.”