Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [23]
In the days just before her death, she lay in bed in a laudanum-induced haze, courtesy of Dr. Gordon. In the stillness of one evening, Eliza Brown, the night nurse, was at her bedside. Filled suddenly with a fear of being alone, a fear that dogged her all of her life but intensified in her final days, she said to Eliza, “You know that I have given you so much money, and I want you to stay with me as long as I live.”
Eliza could think of nothing to say besides, “Yes, Miss Howland, I will.” Sylvia held on for a few days longer, with Electa or Eliza Brown always by her side. It must have taken some fortitude to serve this mistress, particularly toward the end. If one of them so much as left the room, she would ask nervously where they were going and when they would be back. Dr. Gordon stayed in the next room. Sylvia frequently called for him; other times she simply asked Electa or Eliza to reassure her that he was still nearby, in case she should need him. But for all of her fears, and her desperate need for companionship, nothing could forestall the journey that she would soon have to take all alone. On July 2, Sylvia Ann Howland died. She was so worn down by her inactive life, so frail, so thin, so withered, so unfulfilled—it seems difficult to imagine that she was only fifty-nine years old.
FOUR
ALONE IN A CROWD
Hetty was just getting herself settled in New York when she received news of Sylvia’s death, news that beckoned her back to New Bedford for the second time in three weeks to bury a close relative. Her grief over Sylvia’s death was tempered on her northbound journey by the knowledge that she was steeling for a fight. At last, Sylvia’s death promised to force the secretive drama of her will to a very public conclusion.
New Bedford was, suddenly, a different place for Hetty, home only to ghosts. Every member of that extended cast of relatives who had taken a hand in raising her was dead. Among the living residents of New Bedford she had hardly a friend whom she felt she could trust. Rumors regarding Sylvia’s will swirled around the town, visions of dollars dancing in one parlor, parsonage, and counting house after another, from Hard Dig to the top of the hill. Anticipation rippled through not just those expecting direct bequests, but a much larger stratum of distant Howland relatives who learned that, upon Hetty’s death, the remainder of the trust would be distributed among them.
Decades later, when Hetty was an elderly woman, a friend of hers named C. W. deLyon Nicholls, described her experience at Sylvia’s funeral, in a 1913 article for Business America magazine:
Her aunt’s establishment she found to be in the custody and under the ironclad rule of a band of avaricious doctors and nurses. One of the former [presumably a reference to Dr. Gordon] transfixing her with a hypnotic stare, exclaimed, “Really, Miss Robinson, I am very sorry to see you looking so miserable. At best, you cannot hold out longer than a year.” … The day of the funeral arrived. Every remote ramification of the family tree able to walk, with or without crutches, put in an appearance. Miss Robinson slipped in so deeply swathed in crepe that she was not recognized. With her head bowed against the piano and almost prostrated with grief, she overheard a couple of these distant relations chuckling to themselves, ‘When Hetty dies we will have a whole greenhouse built onto our house.”
Since the only possible source for this account was Hetty herself, it is impossible to verify this scene. It is difficult to imagine Hetty being able to appear incognito at Sylvia’s funeral. Sylvia’s maids and nurses would later recall not a niece “prostrated with grief” but a hard-eyed, calculating woman eager to get down to business.