Hetty (31 page)

Because of this connection with Wellesley, Ned in 1923 talked his sister into joining him in a $500,000 donation to the college. They agreed to give $50,000 each per year for five years, toward the construction of an administration building. The building, with a tower rising 185 feet high from Norumbega Hill, was constructed of brick and Indiana limestone; it was and remains the most prominent building on campus. It also bears the distinction of being the only edifice or monument to Hetty Green. It is called Hetty H. R. Green Hall.

For all of their vast differences in personality and temperament, Ned and Sylvia cared for one another. Letters between these two wealthy, childless siblings are playful and affectionate, passing along trivial details of daily life. Ned signed letters to his sister “Your affectionate brother,” or “Your loving brother.” He addresses Sylvia, whose first given name was Hetty, as “Hetty B.”

The day after Christmas 1927, Sylvia wrote: “Many thanks for the electric clock you so kindly sent to Greenwich. I have put it in the library under George Washington’s picture. It is with good company.” In 1935, he sent her another gift, a case of three dagger rum, “which I think is about the finest on the market. I have found this rum to be an excellent sleep producer, and this is how you fix it up: Put some cracked ice in a glass; then squeeze in half a lime; then put in a little over an ounce of rum and gradually increase it until you have two ounces in; then add a little sugar and drink it just before going to bed.”

Sylvia owned a dog named Prince. Ned had two, Stella and Beauty. In the summer of 1928, Sylvia sent a dog bed for Stella. Ned wrote back to “Dear Auntie” from “Your affectionate
niece,” as though Stella was Ned and Mabel’s child, writing a thank-you note to her Aunt Sylvia. This conceit amused Ned; he used it on several occasions. Once, he sent a Western Union telegram to Prince, Sylvia’s dog. It read: “Wishing your mother and you many happy returns of the day.—Stella and Beauty.” It is impossible to miss the pathos between the lines, of the aging brother and sister, both childless, exchanging gifts and notes for their dogs instead of their children, writing in the voices of their pets, the closest either of them ever came to producing heirs.

Sylvia, a widow since the death of her husband in 1926, shared her mother’s contempt for Mabel. Ned and Mabel tried their best to thaw Sylvia’s feelings toward her sister-in-law. Ned refers casually to “Aunt Mabel” in some of the letters, and sends love from both of them. But Sylvia wasn’t buying any of it. To Sylvia, she would always be “Mabel Harlot,” the interloper after the family fortune, as she had been to Hetty. In 1930, when Ned fell ill at Round Hill, Mabel sent a seventy-two-word telegram to Sylvia: “Connection over the phone was so bad could not talk to you as I wanted to. While Ned is getting along fairly well, I would like you to come down and see for yourself. Dr. Pascal advises blood transfusion, will probably be Thursday. You could understand things much better if you were here. I could meet you at Providence if you will advise me time of arrival there. Love from us both. Mabel.” Sylvia responded with the chilly, aloof politeness of someone turning down a dinner invitation from a social inferior: “Regret cannot make a trip at present. All best wishes. Sylvia Wilks.”

Mabel’s note to Dr. Henry S. Pascal, Ned’s New York doctor, and the reference to the blood transfusion in a letter to Sylvia, reveals Ned’s state of health. Because he was so tall and heavy, weighing between 250 and 300 pounds for most of his adult life, his good right leg took a tremendous amount of wear and tear. By his fifties, Ned was suffering from advanced arthritis, which made getting around on his own difficult. He frequently traveled
in a wheelchair as the condition worsened. He took copious amounts of Bromo-Seltzer for his stomach, which caused, according to Dr. Pascal, acetanilide poisoning. He suffered from anemia and heart disease. For several years he included stops in Lake Placid, New York, on his regular circuit between Miami and Round Hill, seeking rest and treatment at the Lake Placid Club. He was there in June 8, 1936, when he died. He was sixty-seven years old. The coroner listed the cause of death as myocardial failure.

The Colonel was transported back to New Bedford, where a procession of local dignitaries followed him out to Round Hill for the funeral services. But Ned was not to be buried at his beloved Round Hill. Shortly after the funeral, Ned, the lover of trains, took his final ride up into the hills of Vermont. Although he had little personal connection with Bellows Falls, he was taken up to join his mother and father in the cemetery of the Episcopal church.

For the Greens, money and litigation always went hand in hand, and Ned’s death prompted two spectacular court cases. In the first, Mabel tried to invalidate the prenuptial agreement she had signed forswearing any claim on the fortune. She tried to prove that the Colonel had been predominantly a resident of Texas, which had one of the nation’s strongest community property laws. She wanted half of Ned’s estate. But Ned had signed his will in 1908, when his mother was still alive. He left everything to Hetty and, should Hetty be dead, to his sister. The fact that he had not felt compelled to update it during the remaining twenty-eight years of his life speaks to the closed circle that the family fortune had become. The fortune must stay in the immediate family. He would not violate that trust. Mabel hired a prominent Philadelphia law firm to handle her case. But she was outgunned by an opponent—Sylvia—who had more money, more lawyers, and who had spent much of her formative life in courtrooms observing her mother in action. For Sylvia, the idea of sharing the fortune with Mabel was untenable.
She felt, as keenly as her brother, the importance of keeping the money within the nuclear family, even if that number had now dwindled down to one lonely widow of sixty-five. She was prepared to do whatever she had to do, even if it meant calling up private details from her brother’s life.

Sylvia’s lawyers traveled to Texas to dig up dirt on Mabel, which, by implication, involved digging up dirt on Ned. They paid a call on a man named Dan Quill, the son of Ned’s early secretary at the Texas Midland. The elder Quill had written an unpublished memoir allegedly detailing wild times in Terrell in Ned’s early days there. On September 30, 1936, Dan Quill wrote a letter to Mabel in Port Henry, New York, where she was staying. Quill promised Mabel that he had not shown the memoir to the lawyers, but he
had
contacted New York agents about the possibility of publishing it. He would, of course, withhold publication should he find some other means by which to take care of his aging mother. “I wish to sincerely state there is no disposition on the part of the Quill family to in any way injure your cause of action in the Courts, and you have our assurance that nothing will be done in this matter until advice is received from you.” It is not known how Mabel responded to this unctuous letter, or if she responded at all. In any case, Sylvia hardly needed Mr. Quill’s memoirs to prevail. Ned’s will was sound, as was the prenuptial agreement Mabel had signed. In the end, more than a year of litigation resulted in a settlement in which Sylvia, gritting her teeth, agreed to pay Mabel a nuisance settlement of $500,000 to get rid of her. Mabel went off to live on Long Island, not so wealthy as she hoped but wealthy enough to live out her once riotous life in comfort.

The second court case developed as a battle among four states—New York, Texas, Florida, and Massachusetts—over estate taxes. Each of the four states sought to have Ned declared a legal resident. In the end, although he had never voted in Massachusetts and had avoided paying state income taxes by claiming
to be a resident of Texas, the courts found him to be a resident of Massachusetts. For its efforts, the state received some $5 million in taxes, the largest single estate payoff it had ever received.

So now Sylvia, having rid herself of the annoyances of greedy widows and bureaucrats, gathered the fortune into her arms. Within a few weeks of Edward’s death, Mabel had been evicted from Round Hill, and the house was largely empty. Through her attorneys, Sylvia announced that she would no longer pay to heat Ned’s beloved greenhouses through the winter, and directed that the plants be sold off. Curious residents, accustomed to liberal access to the property, now found the entrance padlocked and guarded by a hired policeman. In South Dartmouth, it did not take residents long to realize that the Colonel’s fabulous party was over; the era of Sylvia clamped down like a January frost.

SEVENTEEN
SCATTERED TO THE WIND

I
n May 1940, two demolition workers from George W. Donahue and Son, of Rutland, Vermont, climbed to the roof of the Tucker House in Bellows Falls. Stepping carefully along the slope, they tied lines around the southeastern chimney. With the lines secured, they stepped back a few paces and gave the signal to workmen on the ground to start pulling. The chimney did not surrender easily. The house had been built to last. The mortar and bricks were as sound and tight as on the day they were laid 134 years earlier.

Eventually, the chimney ceased its protest. It keeled over, fell in silence for a moment, and crashed with a dull thud. The demolition of the Tucker House had begun. Within a few weeks, every vestige of the Green family’s ancestral home, with its magnificent views of the Connecticut River and Mount Kilburn, was gone. Crews leveled, graded, and paved the property, leaving in place of the house that most prosaic footprint of human development: a parking lot.

The demolition came on the express orders of the property
owner: H. Sylvia Ann Howland Robinson Green Wilks, who donated the property to the town. The parking lot was her idea. The symbolism of her choice is inescapable. The woman whose seven-word name paid homage to every branch of her family tree seemed to want nothing more than to eradicate the place where she spent summers dutifully by her mother’s side; the place where her father died. It was as if she believed a layer of steaming asphalt might adequately seal her past away forever.

Round Hill held equally little interest for Sylvia. In 1948, she donated her brother’s grand estate to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which had conducted so many experiments there during the Colonel’s lifetime. MIT used the property for radio experiments. Scientists erected dozens of broadcast towers and antennas and sent signals into deep space. One dish antenna, a relic of those days, sits on a promontory overlooking the ocean, and is a well-known landmark for local boaters. The Institute used the property until 1964, when it became a Jesuit retreat. The property has since been developed and is dotted with private homes. The mansion has been converted into luxury condominiums.

Sylvia spent most of her time in New York City, looking after the fortune that had concentrated in her hands. She spent far less money than her brother had, and she made good, sound business decisions. With her mother, brother, and husband dead, Sylvia lived a quiet and solitary life, shuttling between her New York apartment at 988 Fifth Avenue, and her home in Greenwich. In Connecticut, she studied the birds that flitted about her garden. Human visitors were more rare—they included a few old friends from Bellows Falls. One was Helen Guild, who had befriended Sylvia half a century earlier at the suggestion of her mother, who told her that Sylvia “hasn’t had a happy girlhood.”

As old women, Helen and Sylvia walked along Sylvia’s small stretch of private beach in Greenwich, about a mile from her house, watching waves and picking up shells. They toured
Greenwich in Sylvia’s chauffeur-driven Lincoln, stopping for ice cream at a local parlor, or ducking into a dress shop, where Sylvia instructed her friend to choose seven or eight dresses for herself.

Sylvia also remained in touch with Mary Nims Bolles, her old friend from Bellows Falls. Mary visited Sylvia in Greenwich occasionally, and the two exchanged letters and gifts at the holidays. When Mary sent Sylvia some fruit from Florida in 1946, Sylvia replied, “My dear Mary. Many thanks for the oranges & grapefruit—Sorry to hear your eyes are not behaving well. We all have some trouble one way or another.” Sylvia did not, as a rule, send out Christmas cards. But one Christmas, Mary did receive a thin, plain envelope. The envelope, almost overlooked amid the profusion of boxes and presents, contained no card or note, just a check from Sylvia for $500.

Sylvia died in a New York hospital on the evening of February 4, 1951, at the age of eighty. Obituaries noted that Sylvia died without heirs, and that her passing had put an end to the strange and fabulous saga of Hetty Green. And they remarked on Sylvia’s unusual upbringing. “Sylvia was grudgingly permitted to enter New York society in 1897–98 and occasionally visited friends in Newport, but these sorties were timid, reluctant, and accomplished very little beyond the finding of a suitable husband,” the Times noted. The obituary added: “As time wore on, she developed many of the frugal characteristics of her mother in a gentler way. Few friends graced her life, nor did she derive much apparent enjoyment from the wealth at her disposal.”

The
Herald Tribune
wrote that “Mrs. Wilks, a tall, austere woman, shunned publicity and pursued privacy with almost the intense devotion that fired her famous mother.” The article continued: “Even her estate managers seldom saw her, although she continued to be active in the management of her vast financial affairs, and always made major financial decisions herself.”