Hetty (22 page)

W
hen the attention she generated in Brooklyn grew to be too much, Hetty began looking for another place to live. With Manhattans high cost of living, the alternative to Brooklyn lay on the western banks of the Hudson River. Hoboken, New Jersey, where Hetty first rented an apartment in 1895, was an unpretentious town of immigrants, mainly of German or Irish descent. Hoboken was a rail and shipping center that since the eighteenth century had offered regular ferry service to lower Manhattan. For years, passengers had made the mile-and-a-half crossing over the Hudson aboard side-wheel steam ferries such as the
Morristown
and the
Montclair
, named for New Jersey towns. But forward-thinking Hoboken in 1898 had added to its fleet the
Bergen
, the world’s first steam ferry with double-screw propulsion, a major advancement in speed and reliability over the plodding side-wheelers.

For Hetty, good ferry service was one of Hoboken’s three main attractions. The other two were cheap rents and relief, if only temporary, from the tax collectors and reporters in Brooklyn. She
liked the plain-spoken people and the hard-working, businesslike personality of her new town. Yet while Hoboken served as her primary residence for the rest of her life, she would continue to move restlessly about, from Bellows Falls to boardinghouses and hotels in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Boston, and Morristown, New Jersey. She remained determined never to stay in one place long enough to be pinned as a resident. The annual city directory for Hoboken and neighboring Jersey City lists any number of Greens from the mid-1890s through 1916, the last year of Hetty’s life. There is Abbie Green, a bookkeeper; Hannah Green, a tailor; Margaret Green, a widow; and Clayborne Green, a janitor. But nowhere does the name of the most famous Green appear.

And yet the residents of Hoboken became accustomed to the sight of Hetty on the streets. She rented several apartments over the years, mainly in two buildings located on the northern edge of the city. One was a large, six-story brick structure at 1309 Bloomfield Street. The second was two blocks closer to the river, along Washington Street. The flats Hetty rented were always modest, but the buildings were large, modern for their times, and well-built. Both are still in use. The building on Washington Street was and remains especially prominent, occupying an entire city block between Twelfth and Thirteenth Streets. Officially named The Elysian Apartments, it was more popularly known in Hetty’s day as “Yellow Flats” because of the yellowish tint to the brickwork, or, sometimes, as “The Barracks,” presumably because of the military-looking architecture, with parapets adorned with patterned brick.

To ward off the inquisitive, Hetty identified herself as “C. Dewey” on the name tag next to the electric buzzer at the entrance to Yellow Flats. This was her private joke. Dewey was the name of her pet Skye terrier; the “C” stood for “Cutie,” one of the dog’s nicknames. When reporters inevitably tracked her down in Hoboken as they had in Brooklyn, she frequently took the back stairs, ducking down the broad alleyway behind the building and slipping quietly onto the street.

Typical of her quarters during these years was a five-room, steam-heated apartment on the third floor of Yellow Flats, for which she was said to pay $23 per month. The apartment contained a small parlor, perhaps eight by ten feet, lit by one small window and a gas lamp that she kept at the lowest level that would maintain a flame. The room’s mantle was decorated with a large bouquet of imitation American Beauty roses, made from dyed chicken feathers. Hetty proudly told visitors she had bought them in Chicago for a dollar. “I’d have to pay twenty times that for real ones, and they wouldn’t last a week,” she said. “These are good for ten years yet.” Near the flowers were two photographs of Ned, a portrait of herself at twenty-six, and, on the walls, some pictures of dogs and cats. The furnishings were simple—a couch and three chairs arranged around a small table.

Hetty kept to a simple and predictable daily routine. Each morning she awoke early enough to eat a light breakfast in her apartment and make the short walk, rain or shine, to the ferry slip in order to catch the 7 A.M. ferry to Manhattan. She enjoyed the ferry ride—the water reminded her of New Bedford. From the landing at West Fourteenth Street, she rode a public streetcar to the Chemical National Bank offices on Broadway at City Hall Square. She was, invariably, among the first to arrive at the bank. She made her way back to a far corner of the narrow banking room, where she kept a desk near a window. As the bank began to fill up, the line of clerks created a Maginot Line of privacy between Hetty and the bank’s everyday customers. Hetty spent her days cutting bond coupons that were coming due, speaking with representatives of the bank about her investments, and opening her mail, which she arranged to have delivered to the bank rather than her home. Requests for money from individuals and organizations invariably dominated the mail. She disposed of most of these immediately. “If I acknowledged them all,” she told an interviewer, “I’d have almost as many cousins as I have dollars.” When she left the bank to
attend to business around Wall Street, she sometimes wore a thin black veil over the brim of her bonnet to avoid being recognized.

She ate a small and hurried lunch at any of several nearby restaurants where she was occasionally recognized despite her veil. Hetty sightings at restaurants became the stuff of legend. A businessman quoted in the Times claimed to have witnessed the following exchange while eating lunch at a downtown restaurant, when a shabbily dressed woman entered and sat down.

“Waiter, I want the best steak you can give me for thirty cents.”

“We have no thirty-cent steaks, madam.”

“No thirty-cent steaks! Haven’t you something you can warm up for me?”

“No, madam.”

“Well, how much is your tea?”

“Ten cents.”

“Ten cents! Well, it isn’t worth it. How much are your stews?”

“Fifteen cents.”

“Can’t you let me have a stew for less than that? “No, madam.”

“Well, you can bring me some tea, some toast without butter, and a stew.”

When the woman had finished eating, she paid thirty cents for her meal (no tip) and walked off muttering that her dinner was worth at most twenty-five. The waiter walked in the other direction, grumbling, and the businessman felt compelled to ask the identity of the diner.

“Hetty Green.”

Other encounters with waiters were equally colorful but less confrontational. When she heard a waiter complain of rheumatism, she offered her trusty cure: “dissolve two raw eggs, shells and all, in a pint of vinegar. Then add the same amount of alcohol and shake thoroughly. Apply to the part that aches and
rub well.” The waiter, Louis LaFranche, recalled the incident with fondness and humor years later, when he had become assistant manager at Bostons Hotel Lenox. LaFranche reported that the concoction worked remarkably well for his pains. He also reported dryly that the recipe came “in lieu of a tip.”
*

In the evening, Hetty was usually among the last to leave the bank. In the winter, she made her way back to a late ferry and ate dinner at 8 P.M. in her small dining room with Sylvia, or with only Dewey by her side. The dog ate well—rice pudding and beefsteak, rare.

Many of these intimate glimpses of Hetty’s domestic life were recorded by an ambitious young journalist named Leigh Mitchell Hodges. In 1899, Hodges was a $50-a-week staff writer for
Ladies’ Home Journal
, fresh from the
Kansas City Star.
Shortly after his arrival, the editor, Edward Bok, decided to test him with an assignment that he deemed impossible—an in-depth interview with the famous Hetty Green. While Hetty tended to be tolerant with reporters who tracked her down in the hallway of a hotel, or in a hearing room, she rarely granted more than a quote in passing. Hodges first attempted to see her at the Chemical Bank, where he announced himself, sent in his card, and received no reply. On the suggestion of a clerk, Hodges waited for Hetty outside the bank until the end of the day, then followed her to the ferry. He waited until she had taken a seat. He approached her and asked if she was Hetty Green. She stared at him and said nothing, He apologized and slunk away. Then he discreetly followed her to her apartment building in Hoboken. A dollar slipped to the janitor revealed the secret of “C. Dewey.” Hodges rang the bell, and waited. There was no response. The dogged young reporter kept this up for a couple
of weeks, ringing at different times of the day. Finally, it dawned on him to try the building doorknob. It opened and he walked upstairs to “C. Dewey’s” apartment and knocked.

Hetty, who opened the door, asked sharply, “Who are you and what do you want?” Hodges identified himself, expecting to be thrown unceremoniously out on his ear. Instead, Hetty invited him into her parlor. She respected his doggedness. Once they were seated, the genial reporter thawed her frosty suspicions. She patiently sat and spoke with him for more than two hours, recalling her childhood education in business at the knee of her grandfather and father, her time at finishing school in Boston, and her theories on investments and money.

During the course of the interview, Hodges sat on the couch—“a shabby haircloth sofa”—with Dewey sitting between him and Hetty. Hetty stroked Dewey affectionately during the interview, calling him “dearie.”

Hodges was clearly enamored of Hetty and, like others aware of her fearsome reputation, surprised to find not the dour, sharp-faced woman he had expected, but an oddly youthful woman with a quick sense of humor and, when she let her guard down, a warm smile. “Her face is strong—quite masculine in its character—but her voice is low and womanly,” Hodges reported. “Her deep sunken eyes are of steel gray, with a tinge of blue, and penetrate one as if they were sharpened points of metal. They lose nothing within range, and twinkle with a keen sense of humor that asserts itself more boldly in her conversation. They are as bright as the eyes of a child, and her cheeks are as rosy. If time and care had not drawn deep lines across her forehead and around her mouth one would not believe she was sixty-five years old.”

Hodges asked Hetty why she avoided society when she might have been its queen. “As for society, I believe in it,” she said. “When a young woman, I went out a good deal myself. I don’t think society means what some rich people would have us believe. I’d get very tired of living in one of those great houses in
New York, going all night and sleeping all day. They don’t have any real pleasure. It’s intercourse with people that I like.”

While Hetty could be ruthless with her financial enemies, she developed a reputation among many in Hoboken as a friendly neighbor. When a German woman living in the next apartment became ill, Hetty sat up with her at night and nursed her. She gave children in the neighborhood toy banks with a dollar inside. If, after a few weeks, the children brought the banks back with more than a dollar, proof that they were saving rather than spending their money, she would chip in another dollar. When a young couple wrote to her, saying that they had named their baby Hetty in her honor, she mailed the newborn as a gift a toy savings bank with a dollar inside.

She made friends with some prominent Hoboken citizens, including James and Michael Smith, Irish immigrants who had prospered as storekeepers. James Smith was city treasurer, and in time would serve as a witness to the signing of Hetty’s will. Hetty in turn was willing to aid Michael Smith, who had a taste for expensive living. Michael outfitted his brownstone town-house on Hudson Street with inlaid floors, engraved brass fittings, and molded plaster walls and ceilings. Exquisitely carved woodwork covered the length and breadth of the house, reaching a peak of opulence in the dining room, where a massive, hand-carved china cabinet covered an entire wall, and the ceiling was covered in carvings more exquisite still. Even in Hoboken, where there was a steady supply of inexpensive and skilled European labor, Michael Smith’s spending habits left him in need of cash. Smith’s checking records, found decaying in the attic by the current residents of the house, indicate that Smith repaid Hetty at least $1,600 in loans made over a period of several years.

As she had in Bellows Falls, in Hoboken Hetty became a part of the local lore. Perhaps the most enduring story about Hetty in Hoboken involves the time in 1903 when she left the town in a huff after being served a summons by the town recorder for failure to pay a $2 license fee for her dog. Hetty at
first claimed that Dewey was licensed in New York and she therefore assumed she did not have to pay a fee in Hoboken. Next she claimed that the dog belonged to Sylvia, who stayed with her only infrequently. The recorder was unmoved. Faced with a maximum $25 fine, Hetty grudgingly sent an acquaintance named Charles Gahagan to the local Health Department to pay the $2. Irked by the incident, Hetty packed for a trip to Chicago, vowing to find another town when she returned. “Mrs. Hetty Green has left Hoboken, and, it is rumored, for good,” the Times reported on April 4. “The experiences Mrs. Green had during the last month or so did not strike her as pleasant, and an intimate friend of hers said yesterday that she was not likely to return to Hoboken to reside.” But distance mollified Hetty’s anger, and return she did.

Three years later, as she boarded a Hoboken streetcar, she found herself short of the proper change. “I’ll pay my fare later at the office,” she told the conductor, according to the Times of January 21, 1906. “That letter carrier sitting opposite will vouch for me.” When the postman nodded, the conductor paid Hetty’s fare himself. The next day, Hetty arrived at the trolley company office with a nickel. She asked for a receipt. The conductor, George Krell, saved the nickel as a souvenir.

In their advancing years, Hetty and Edward found themselves drawn back together. Edward, well into his seventies when Hetty moved to Hoboken in the mid-1890s, was increasingly infirm. With Ned in Texas and Sylvia spending more of her time with Annie Leary in New York and Newport, Hetty turned her attentions to nursing him. Unorthodox as their marriage was, Hetty and Edward had been married for more than 30 years, and Hetty never fully severed the ties of family. Edward still spent much of his time at the Union Club in New York City, but he also from time to time occupied an apartment just above Hetty’s in Hoboken, where she would visit and read to him in the evenings after she returned from New York.