Hetty_ The Genius and Madness of America's First Female Tycoon - Charles Slack [48]
As Hetty twisted and writhed, May let it be known (both in person and through the papers) that he had all the time in the world. Quoting “a friend of the assignee,” the Tribune reported: “Mr. May could wind up the affairs of the depositors in four weeks, but he prefers, for the sake of all, to nurse matters, and is willing to devote a year to bringing things out straight. Not a man of the depositors has asked for his money; on the contrary, most of them are willing that the assignee should take his time about payment.” The line about “not a man” may or may not have been a sly reference to Hetty’s gender, but the article closed with this: “No information as to Mrs. Green’s attitude was furnished by the assignee.”
The prospect of having no control over her fortune for weeks or even months at last wore Hetty’s resistance down. In early February, she curled her fingers around a pen and forced herself to scrawl out a check for $422,143.42. She also agreed to relinquish half of her deposit, or, $280,015.62. This brought her total payment to $702,159.04. With that, she packed up her securities and took them in a hired cab—an unaccustomed luxury, but a necessary one, considering the size of the bundle—to the offices of the Chemical National Bank.
Hetty would never forget the many indignities done to her through the Cisco fiasco. She held a grudge against Lewis May and, in particular, against Collis P. Huntington, the railroad magnate. She patiently planned her revenge on May, waiting almost two years to the day from the time of the Cisco failure, when May had at last sorted out the finances and was preparing to pay off the long-waiting creditors. Hetty filed objections with the New York State Supreme Court, claiming that May had defrauded the creditors by paying himself inflated commissions as assignee. According to the New York Times, Judge William S. Keiley had agreed to hear Hetty’s objections, but only on the condition that she pay all court expenses should she lose. The fact that the costs would easily reach $10,000 shows the depth of her anger.
Keiley, who had been appointed by the court to approve May’s handling of the Cisco failure, had already found his work exemplary. But Hetty claimed his commissions of $139,500 to be exorbitant. She claimed that the law firms handling the case had earned too much—$27,000—and that May had erred hiring Frederick Foote, one of the Cisco partners, for $10,000 per year, to assist him in handling the case. As with the earlier Aunt Sylvia trial, the action against May had the practical effect of holding up payments to a large number of potential recipients, in this case depositors who now had to wait another year to get their money. Her goal, no doubt, was to embarrass May. Hetty hired a New York lawyer named Nelson Smith to handle the proceedings, but she took practical control herself, attending every hearing and often personally questioning witnesses. Her conduct exasperated the judge and left even her own lawyer groping for words.
May added fuel to Hetty’s anger by boasting on the witness stand that he may not, in retrospect, have been able legally to force Hetty to cover her husband’s debts. His acknowledgment that Hetty might have been able to walk away with all of her cash, in addition to her securities, was a double slap, both in the loss of money and in the gleeful implication that Hetty had been bested in a deal. May called his and his lawyer’s handling of Hetty, “One of the greatest things ever accomplished in the city of New York, and I was daily complimented for it.”
Hetty was still steaming when she assumed the duties of questioning John A. Cisco on the witness stand. According to the Times account, “she went for him like a tigress and nothing could hold her.