Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [41]
Merchants reportedly tried to lie low when they saw Hetty Green approaching. She was known to demand the cheapest possible goods and, still, to haggle endlessly over a bill. One shopkeeper remembered that Hetty had come into his shop and, as was her custom, began handling the merchandise. The storekeeper watched in dismay—her hands were black. She explained that she had been pulling some reusable nails out of some boards that had been damaged in a fire in her barn. When she brought her skirt to Wheeler’s Laundry, she is said to have asked that only the bottom portions be washed—the parts that swished through the alternately muddy and dusty street.
In later years, when the family traveled and rented out the Tucker House for periods while they were away, Hetty rented a room over a Bellows Falls bank to store some furniture. A cat apparently entered the room and, unable to find a way out, began to wail. Hetty had taken the key with her to New York, so someone raised a ladder at the rear of the building, broke a window, and retrieved the cat. Months later, Hetty is supposed to have returned to Bellows Falls and found the broken pane upstairs. Fearing she might be charged for the breakage, and as yet unaware of the cat incident, Hetty supposedly picked up a loose cobblestone and presented it to a bank employee, saying, “There’s a lot of glass broken upstairs. Don’t expect me to pay for it. Someone threw this stone through the window. I found it on the floor up there.” As Hetty marched out, the cashier turned the stone over and discovered that it was still damp on one side—a sure indication that Hetty had just picked it up from the street.
Whether consciously or not, Hetty courted the reputation that followed her throughout her life. The more outrageous tales were merely extensions of her habits and behavior and the way of life she followed. More than most people, she had the resources to create for herself any life and any reputation she chose. For her children it was another matter entirely. Ned and Sylvia spent their early years living an odd double life as rich kids whose mother behaved as if they were poor. They wore ill-fitting clothes and got used to being pointed to and whispered about, not out of jealousy, but out of pity.
Ned’s awkwardness was accentuated by a pronounced limp, the result of a childhood sledding accident. The accident is generally believed to have occurred in Bellows Falls during one of the family’s first winters there. But Mary Nims remembered Hetty saying the accident took place earlier, in New York, shortly after they returned from England. “She told my mother that during their first winter in New York there was a snow storm and they bought Edward a sled so that he might slide with the other boys in the park. He had never before seen snow so his enthusiasm over the sport was so great that he injured his knee jumping onto his sled.” As for the nature of the injury, it does not seem to have been a fracture, because Edward continued to walk on the leg after it happened. According to some reports, he dislocated his kneecap. At any rate, the problem was chronic and worsened over time.
Of all of the myths and legends about Hetty’s miserliness handed down from generation to generation, the most persistent and unflattering is that she allowed her son’s leg to worsen over the years because she was too cheap to seek the care of doctors. As with most myths,