Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [11]
But something in Hetty Robinson drew her home, back to her dour family and the seat of her family’s money. Her father sent her $1,200 with instructions to properly outfit herself with dresses and gowns for the social season. Hetty spent only $200 of the money. She put the rest into the bank upon her return to New Bedford.
Between her schooling on Cape Cod and in Boston, Hetty had lived periodically with her parents in a house they had purchased on Second Street. But Hetty always maintained a bedroom in her aunt Sylvia’s home, and stayed there much of the time. As Abby and Edward’s marriage froze over, Abby herself spent much of her time at her sister’s home, seeking refuge from her cold, ill-tempered husband. But even when Abby and Hetty shared a house, Abby was little more than an adjunct parent to her own daughter. And when Abby died, intestate, on February 21, 1860, the effect on Hetty seems to have been something akin to losing a close but not particularly vital relation—a spinster aunt, perhaps. Edward took over virtually all of her $128,000 fortune, with the exception of a house valued at $8,000 that went to Hetty. Abby’s relatively modest holdings at the time of her death, given that she was one of two natural heirs to a whaling fortune, only underscored the extent to which Edward had dominated his wife. From what little is known of Abby’s personality, she handed down almost nothing in the way of personality traits to Hetty; they all came from her father.
It is the actual spinster aunt, Sylvia, Abby’s sister, who occupies a far greater position of importance in this story. Sylvia suffered for decades from a spinal disorder that had apparently started when she was very young. Born into wealth, she never had the health or energy to derive much enjoyment from it. Her condition precluded marriage and travel, and so she found refuge in books. She sat for hours as nurses read to her, carrying her to distant shores with the works of popular authors of the day such as Frederika Bremer and Bayard Taylor. Nurses kept her apprised of world events by reading to her from her favorite newspaper, the Boston Journal. She tried her hand at poetry. A poem handwritten by Sylvia survives in the collection of the New Bedford Free Public Library, in small, delicate cursive:
To Esther
In your Album I descry a page
On which no pen has left its trace
I will endeavor to portray
A wish that may not be erased
May much happiness attend you
And the love of God may you implore
May this blessing rest upon you
And His name may you adore
The poem is dated December 4, 1845, when Sylvia Ann was thirty-nine years old. The Esther of the title remains a mystery. The poem is signed “Sylvia Ann Howland”—a signature that, on different documents and a couple of decades later, would lie at the center of a raging controversy.
As she aged, and especially after the death of her sister in 1860, Sylvia lived a life of Gothic loneliness. She shuttled back and forth between her large house on Eighth Street in New Bedford and Round Hill farm, the family estate. Her world consisted of a few friends and relatives who called on her at the farm or in town, Thomas Mandell, the minor partner in Isaac Howland Jr. and Company who managed her estate, and the round-the-clock attentions of a few loyal servants and nurses.
She was obsessively needy of these paid friends. When they left her for even a few moments, she became ill at ease and implored them to return They were her companions, her world. Gradually, at her request, a small coterie of them gathered around her, gave up their outside work, and built their own worlds around hers. It was a clean trade of full-time attention in exchange for steady, full-time employment. Pardon Gray, a New Bedford livery stable owner and hack driver, was by 1855 driving exclusively for Aunt Sylvia. Pardon’s most frequent route was the seven-mile journey from New Bedford to Round Hill, which took