Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [40]
Inside, the house was dominated by a wide central hallway and a beautiful winding staircase. On the left side were two large rooms connected by a wide passageway; on the right, a parlor and a dining room. Among the furnishings was a portrait of Hetty, painted years earlier, which hung over the mantelpiece. There were also a few valuable pieces that Edward had picked up in the Far East, including the Chinese lacquered stand Edward had bought for his mother. Hetty may well have disapproved of the purchase of the Tucker House. It was too big; it cost too much to heat. It was said that in later years when she stayed there she added makeshift partitions to cut the size of the rooms, and the expense of fuel. But she grew undeniably fond of the house. For a woman who had shuttled from house to house from infancy, the Tucker House became the closest thing she would ever have to her own home. Even when she moved away from Bellows Falls, she returned often to the refuge of its walls.
When the children were old enough, they were enrolled in local schools. Sylvia attended the rectory school at Immanuel Episcopal Church. She was a shy girl by nature, overshadowed throughout her life by a strong and domineering mother. She seems to have had few close friends at any period of her life, but one of her first became one of her best, Mary Nims. Mary lived outside the village center, so she carried a lunch to eat at school while the village children went home. Sylvia ate a hurried lunch at home, then rushed back to school to keep Mary company. Mary recalled Sylvia as a shy but sweet girl who always shared her candy. “Her school dresses were clean and inexpensive. She wore glasses and a stiff little sailor hat that was too small for her was perched on her head. When we all dressed for last day exercises she appeared in a very elaborate dress made with many ruffles of white embroidery that looked like a Godey print. She said it came from England.”
Once the town folk got used to the fact that Hetty Green would not reign as the queen of Bellows Falls, they began to see her, with a mixture of consternation and affection, as a celebrated oddball. Hetty stories developed into a local currency; everyone had at least two or three, and they were handed down by word of mouth, some even to this day, until it is not always clear which are apocryphal and which based on fact. She was, as one local historian put it, “at once the pride and pain of the town.”
Stable hands traded stories about Hetty’s penny-pinching over the family’s carriages and horses. Boarding a horse for the winter, she drove a hard bargain with one stable owner, refusing to pay more than two dollars per week. When the owner informed her that such a small payment could buy only hay for feed, no grain, Hetty is supposed to have replied, “Just hay, then.” The next spring, Hetty discovered the horse looking thin and haggard. The hostler is said to have fed the horse grain from his own pocket. But a winter epidemic had besieged the horses. When the hostler explained the situation to Hetty, she was unimpressed. She refused to pay the bill, saying, “If the horse had had decent feed he would not be so thin.”
Local merchants and others with whom Hetty traded heard her talk at length about her Aunt Sylvia’s estate—in particular about the large number of people awaiting their share of the fortune. “They’re only waiting for me to die so they can have my money,” she would say. “But I’ll fool them. I’ll take such good care of myself that I’ll never be ill. They’ll see who laughs last.”
Among the most celebrated stories in town concerned her obsessive search for a postage stamp. The story began when Hetty took a daylong drive with her horse and carriage, returning the rig to the stable in the evening. “Some time later, after bedtime, there came a knock at the hostler’s door,” Lyman Simpson Hayes wrote. “Mrs. Green presented herself to say that while absent that day she had bought a two-cent stamp which she was