The Richest Woman in America (18 page)

Outdoors in Central Park, Hetty and her family could join the crowd of New Yorkers walking for hours through the eight hundred acres of meadows, hills, and labyrinthine paths, or they could watch the parade of open equipages on the carriage road. On Saturday afternoons, men with pince-nez tapped their canes to their top hats to say hello, and women in capes and shawls nodded beneath their ribboned bonnets, taking their seats as the band began a concert on the mall. Children lined up for bumpy rides in goat carts, rode round and round on carousel horses, whooshed in the air on swings, or sailed on the lake in small boats. When winter came and snow covered the hills, they hauled their sleds to the top and, mufflers flying, swooped down the white slopes, piercing the cold air with screams of joy.
But when young Ned, built like his father, big and tall, jumped onto his sled and banged his knee, his screams were cries of pain. His parents smoothed his tears and soothed his wound, but the damage was done.

When the weather turned warm, Edward shuttled back and forth on the train from Vermont to New York, while Hetty and the children relished the mountain air in Bellows Falls. Spring and summer, the boisterous Ned scrambled over the hills, raced in the fields, and played his favorite game of baseball. But a few years after the sledding accident, he fell from a tree and injured his knee again. This time his screams were worse.

Hetty quickly called for a doctor, but his house was miles away. Waiting for the man to arrive, she applied a warm bandage to the wound; proud of her nursing skills, she thought the poultice had helped. “I went outside and stood at the gate,” she explained, fending off stories that she had been too cheap to call a physician. “When the doctor came, I waved him away and called to him that he wasn’t needed. If he’d gotten out of his buggy, I’d have had to pay him even if he didn’t do anything, you know.” Hetty never paid for something
she did not receive, though the question of whether she received it was often under debate. On the other hand, her friends said, she never forgot a kind service and always rewarded those to whom she felt attached. She gave local children nickels for their birthdays and piggy banks to store them in; she brought soup and medicine to neighbors who were sick and sent money to those who had shown her consideration or done her a favor.

Sadly, Ned’s injury refused to heal, and the boy remained in pain. His parents tried every home remedy they knew, from Carter’s pills to Squibb oil to hot sand. When all proved fruitless, they took him to different doctors, but he had dislocated his knee and every physician recommended the same course: amputation. Too many Civil War soldiers had suffered without anesthetic while their limbs were sawed; too many peg-legged sailors hobbled down New Bedford’s streets; Hetty refused to allow her son Captain Ahab’s fate.

When Hetty learned that Edward’s friend Cynthia Nims was married to a farmer who grew tobacco, she was eager to pay them a call. She had heard that the dry leaves wound around the leg would loosen the ligaments. On a warm day, Edward hitched up the horses and drove the family out to the country.

As soon as Hetty Green arrived at the door, the Nimses’ eight-year-old daughter, Mamie, riddled with curiosity, ran to the living room window and peeked out from behind the blinds to see the fabled woman. The girl watched as two children—the boy Ned, big and lame, and the girl Sylvie, wearing glasses and a sailor hat—played in the garden; Mrs. Green talked at the door, Mr. Green sat in the cart. A little later, he and her father spoke about Edward’s adventures in the East. Shortly afterward, the Greens drove off, their wagon heaped with tobacco leaves, their hearts filled with hope.

But once more, the wished-for cure did not work, and once more, when Ned cried in pain, Hetty carried him in her arms or sat with him through the night. She and Edward took their son from one doctor to another, desperate to find someone who had a good solution. When her husband did not join them, she put on a costume of shabby clothes so she would not be charged extra for being rich, and went alone with Ned. Often the doctors felt sorry for her but sometimes she was found out. Wrapped in her cloak of poverty, she called on specialists in New
York and took the train to Baltimore to see Dr. McLean, a leading orthopedist. Her experience with William Gordon, her aunt’s physician, may have soured her feelings toward doctors, but she was willing to go anywhere to save her son’s leg, willing to try anything from medicines to mechanical devices in his shoe.

Always worried about Ned, his parents indulged him in whatever ways they could. In the winter of 1877, when Hetty decided to switch her Midwestern lawyers from her father’s representatives to Edward’s agents,
the family traveled together to Chicago. Hetty held mortgages and real estate, including the entire town of Cicero, which eventually became the headquarters of the gangster Al Capone, and land downtown that would become the Loop. The Greens rode by private train across the flat Midwest and were met at the end by the fiery glow of steel mills and iron foundries, the pounding clank of new factories, and the bloody smell of the stockyards, all of which enriched the city.

The family checked into Matteson House, a leading hotel even before the Chicago fire, with gas lighting, steam heat, elevators, and French chefs serving guests three meals a day on the American Plan. Its newly redone elegance offered Hetty and Edward a reminder of the years they had stayed at the Langham in London. For Ned and Sylvie, the fancy hotel was a perfect place to play in the corridors or hide their unusual pet, a hen. Their understanding parents did not object. But the management felt otherwise. Tired of the eggs the hen laid under the bed, disgusted with the dirt it dropped on the carpets, they went to extreme measures. When the Greens came back to the room one day, they discovered the chicken was dead: someone had wrung its neck.

The following morning the family checked out. They left for St. Louis, the newspapers said, another terminus for the transcontinental rail, another town where Hetty owned land. On future trips to Chicago, the Greens stayed at Palmer House, owned by Hetty’s friends, which was the city’s finest hotel. One night, Ned and some friends engaged in a furious pillow fight; feathers flew and two sets of pillows were destroyed. When the chambermaid complained, Hetty gave her the money to buy new pillows and told her to send them to the boys. “As long as they’re making noise in the room, I’m satisfied,” she said. “If they had been still, I would have been suspicious.”

The Greens’ travels left little time for the children’s proper schooling.
Like bathers dipping their toes into the sea, they took tentative steps into public school classrooms in New York; other times they studied with private tutors. In Bellows Falls, the children enrolled in the school of the Immanuel Episcopal Church. Seated at one of the double desks in the boys’ front room, Ned studied history and mathematics, while Sylvie sat in the back parlor with her best friend, Mamie Nims, and a handful of other girls, learning to do their needlework by stitching red thread onto muslin.

Ned loved playing baseball with his friends, but when his leg prevented him from running, his mother allowed him to stand in the outfield on the chance a stray ball might come his way. When other boys came to the house, he could throw a ball in the backyard, but he wasn’t permitted to run. Whatever he did, from playing catch to organizing games around town, his mother kept a vigilant eye on him. “Be careful, Ned!” or “Don’t throw the ball so hard to Ned,” she would call out whenever he played with his friends. His parents gave him permission to drive his friends around in their old horse and cart, and once in a while, he was driven around by his sister in a toy wagon. Hetty and Edward gave Ned a larger allowance than most of the boys received, but Hetty’s generosity had its limits. She dressed her children in hand-me-down clothes and was adamant that they watch their pennies. She was pleased when her son and his friends earned money by cleaning bottles for a local distillery; but when Ned lost his coins in a pile of leaves, she insisted he help her search through the heap to find them.

As surely as balls bounce up and down, Edward’s finances sprang high and low. In 1879, when his stocks were moving in the right direction, he purchased Tucker House, the Greek Revival mansion that rose on a hill on Church Street. Once owned by his grandfather, the imposing yellow brick house, with its grand staircase and large central hall, stood like a dowager welcoming the Greens and their friends.

To the right, in the parlor, candles in the crystal chandelier lit up a portrait of Hetty done in her youth. Guests moving about the rooms could see paintings of Edward’s forefathers by John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart hanging over the mantels, and tapestries sewn by Aunt Sylvia hanging on the walls. Around the house mahogany tables and lowboys held silver candlesticks and signed silver pieces from Boston; fainting couches offered a respite for women whose corsets
were pulled too tight; and in the dining room, Queen Anne chairs lined the table where family and friends took their places. Upstairs, a seven-foot bed accommodated the large frame of its owner, Edward Green.

The substantial house boasted a square widow’s walk on the roof and a wide porch in the front, where the outgoing Ned and his shy sister Sylvie sat with his friends on rocking chairs, looking out on the canal and across to the steep face of Mount Kilburn in New Hampshire. In the garden the children grew fruits and vegetables and all around the property they let their pets—cats, dogs, birds, and other animals—run free. But there was no free run for the children: wherever they were, in Bellows Falls, Chicago, or New York, or traveling by railroad in between, Ned and Sylvie lived under the protective gaze of their forceful mother.

O
ur country’s prosperity depends on its having an efficient and well-maintained rail system,” said the investment genius Warren Buffett in 2010 when he invested $34 billion in the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation. “They are the only mode of freight transportation that can handle growth.” Over a century earlier, railroads changed the course of American life. They inspired innovation and energized the economy. They brought farm goods to urban markets, raw materials to factories, finished goods to towns. They ventured into far-flung corners of the country and made them accessible, created cities and linked them together, compressed the vast space between the oceans and laced the populace into a single nation. Then they synchronized the clocks from end to end.

As towns cropped up across the landscape,
each decided on its own time. Aldermen in the East and sheriffs in the West—and the jewelers of any town—looked up to the sky, shielded their eyes with their hands, and gazed at the sun: when it appeared to be at its highest point, they declared the hour to be high noon and set their watches. Residents checked the hands on their church steeple or peered in the window of the jewelry store to find the correct time.

But even when towns were in touching distance, time was unreliable and varied from place to place. The situation created havoc for the railroads. With three hundred different time zones across the country, trains that met at various terminals could not coordinate
their schedules, nor could they even keep to a schedule because it was so confusing.

Travelers in Pittsburgh would find six different clocks at the station. In Buffalo, New York, four clocks showed four different times. A man from Portland, Maine, who was catching a train might well ask an innocent question: “What time is it?” Checking his watch, he would see that it was 12:15. But looking up at the New York Central Railroad clock he would see that it was noon, while the Lake Shore and Michigan Railroad clock announced it was 11:25 and the Buffalo city clock stated it was 11:40.

Travelers from the East might have to reset their watches two hundred times before reaching California. Trains might wait at one stop for farmers to arrive with their freight and then, at the next, find farmers who had been waiting with freight for a long time. Cities a mile apart geographically could be several minutes apart chronometrically. Twelve o’clock in New York was four and a half minutes past twelve in Newark; five past the hour in Boston was seven past the hour in Lewiston, Maine. Confused passengers could not calculate what time they would arrive or what time they would depart.