The Richest Woman in America

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The Richest Woman in America Page 3

by Janet Wallach


  She joined him as a regular for lunch at the Central Union co-op, where the floor was covered in sawdust and the air smelled of strong food. With little regard for her clothes, she plunked herself on one of the wooden barrels and munched on pickles and chunks of yellow cheese. While her father traded stories with the other men, who all owned shares in the store, the attractive young girl with intense blue eyes and red lips laughed along with them. Her long limbs and buxom figure drew their admiring glances.

  At her father’s house, when his eyesight began to fail, she read him the evening news from the Boston Herald and New York Tribune. When she asked questions, he took the time to explain, teaching her the meaning of stocks and bonds, bulls and bears, commodities and market fluctuations. With more to gain in New Bedford than at the school in Sandwich, at the age of fifteen, Hettie H. Robinson (as she spelled her name at the time) enrolled in the summer session at the local Quaker school.

  The principal design of the Friends Academy was “to diffuse useful knowledge,” “to guard the morals of the youth,” and “to encourage piety and religion in their progress in literature.” It was only recently that the Quaker students had won permission to read Shakespeare and Rousseau, but Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden, Locke’s essays, and Gibbon’s Roman Empire were all required, along with spelling, composition, penmanship, and calisthenics. For two years, Hetty joined the girls in her class as they sat through tedious lessons, took turns ringing the bell, swept the floors, and kept the fires kindled.

  Despite the school’s attempts, Hetty’s interest in academics, as well as her terrible spelling, showed no sign of improvement. The language she heard on the docks rolled from her lips as easily as from a sailor’s; what’s more, her appearance was scruffy, and her clothes, approved by her father, were disheveled and shabby. In the judgment of the neat and resolute Sylvia, the Howland/Robinson family’s only heir required some refinement. Hetty was reaching the age of marriage, and with the family fortune at stake, her aunt was concerned that she lacked the ability to attract the right kind of man. If Sylvia could not enjoy a better life herself, at least she could help her niece attain it.

  Anna Cabot Lowell gave considerable thought to the education of girls. Religion and fulfillment of the soul, she said, deserved equal time with the scholarly pursuit of algebra, astronomy, Cicero, and Milton. But a young woman also had an obligation to learn how to run a household, nurture children, and engage in social intercourse. At the finishing school she ran for fashionable girls in Boston, Hetty’s family paid twenty dollars per quarter to give her the chance to engage in her studies, develop her penmanship, practice the piano, and perfect her needlework. The school was given the chance to turn a rough mollusk into a cultured pearl.

  In part it worked. From nine in the morning till two in the afternoon there were sessions in geography, English history, and biography, and discussions, too, about new novels. If they read Moby-Dick, Hetty could enlighten her classmates with her personal knowledge of whales and whaling ships. But when they studied Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was the tragedy of one particular girl that really brought home the plight of the slaves.

  It took a long time before the girls stopped talking about their classmate who had gone home for her father’s funeral in the South. Unbeknownst to her fellow students, the girl was a mulatto who passed for white; she had been sent north by her slave-owning father to live as a member of his family. After her father’s death when she went back south, she assumed she would be accepted as a freed slave. But her father’s brother thought otherwise: he claimed her as his legal inheritance. Devastated at the thought of being a slave, the girl committed suicide. It was a tragedy that tore at the hearts of her classmates.

  Nonetheless, as adolescents do, the girls put aside their sadness and managed to amuse themselves. They took walks in the Boston Commons, just a few blocks from school, and paid visits to Faneuil Hall. They heard arias by the Swedish opera star Jenny Lind at the Boston Musical Hall and went to teas at the homes of friends. Hetty’s brusque manner showed through in her reply to an invitation from the wife of her father’s business associate. “Shall we have the pleasure of your company to tea this afternoon to meet some of your young friends,” asked Lydia Swain, adding, “A happy New Year to you—and to your Aunt and Mother.” Hetty dispatched her response with little grace: “I can not expect to accept your kind invitation on account of sickness. Mother and Aunt’s regards,” she wrote.

  Along with the city’s most proper youth, Hetty took classes at Lorenzo Papanti’s Dance Studio, where the thin, glossy-wigged count, wearing patent-leather pumps, taught them how to move and how to comport themselves. Under his wary eye, the students stifled a giggle now and then and learned to dance. “Point your toe, Miss Robinson!” Papanti might call out, and if Miss Robinson did not point her toe properly, the fiery teacher would rap her foot with his fiddle bow. “Back straight, Mr. Cabot!” he might say to another, and if the student did not draw himself up with his back erect, Papanti would drum the bow on his spine.

  Not only were the students taught to dance, they learned how to conduct themselves at parties and balls. The rules were strict: a gentleman must bow when asking a lady to dance; he must not ask the same girl to dance twice; he should not take a seat next to a young lady he did not know; if he walked someone home after a ball, he must not enter her house, but should call on her the following day.

  As for the ladies, they must remember not to hold hands or fraternize with favored men; must not refuse to dance with any gentleman; must not dance more than once with the same partner. The worst, as one woman complained, was the rule for moving about the room: “A woman, old or young, may not stir from her seat to get supper, or avoid a draught, or change places for a better view, without being annexed to the arm of some member of the selecting sex for whom she must wait or whistle.”

  Hetty polished her etiquette, pointed her toes, and stiffened her spine. Dressed in her best frock, dancing shoes, and long white gloves, she held her partner lightly as they stepped across the ballroom floor in a polka, a waltz, or a quadrille. Over the months the studio’s big mirrors reflected her progress from a stomping adolescent to a graceful young woman.

  It showed when the effulgent New Bedford debutante first appeared in public in 1854. With a wreath of flowers in her curly hair, a black velvet ribbon around her neck, and filigreed gold balls dancing at her ears, she held her hooped petticoats and curtsied in a white muslin dress. Her twinkling eyes and rosy complexion, robust figure and quick retorts dazzled the eligible young men.

  Hetty did little to encourage them. When a starry-eyed suitor came to the family hardware store where she sometimes worked, he cast an eager glance as she lifted her skirts to climb the stairs, hoping for a glimpse of her graceful ankles. But the stars in his eyes nearly turned to tears when he beheld the sight of her ragged stockings hanging about her calves.

  She may have been unmoved by the smitten young man, but the choice of husbands was slim in New Bedford and their bank accounts were even slimmer, compared to those of Hetty’s family. No daughter of Edward Robinson and no niece of Sylvia Howland would marry beneath herself. Her mother’s cousin Henry Grinnell, Joseph’s brother, had moved with his wife to a bigger city where the chances of meeting the right man were far greater. Arrangements were made, and with a deposit of $1,200 placed in a special bank account, her father took her down to the waterfront and wished her well. Giving her orders to embellish her wardrobe, he waved goodbye as she climbed aboard an overnight steamer and set off alone for New York.

  Chapter 3

  A City of Riches

  Rich, hemmed thick all around with sail ships and steamships … crowded streets, high growths of iron … the houses of business of the ship-merchants and the money-brokers … the carts hauling goods, the manly race of drivers of horses.… City of hurried and sparkling waters! City of spires and masts! City nested in bays! My city!”

  Hetty awoke in the morning to Walt Whitman’s
beloved city, “Mannahatta”: a hustling, bustling whirlwind of carts, wagons, hansom cabs, hackney coaches, and horse-drawn omnibuses clattering and clopping on the cobblestones, a cacophony of sounds ricocheting against the iron and stone buildings crammed together on the lower Manhattan streets. Hammers rang against stones as workers constructed new buildings, and all around, old structures moaned under crumbling blows.

  New York was celebrating a financial boom. New institutions were opening on every corner, filling the canyons of Wall Street with retail banks, commercial banks, insurance companies, and brokerage firms. Investors in mining, real estate, and transportation were flush with funds. Eager to spend their new wealth, they were tearing down old buildings as fast as they could and putting up new ones so frequently that Harper’s Magazine complained the city was unrecognizable for anyone born forty years before. Walt Whitman called it a “rabid, feverish itching for change.”

  Newly rich couples filled extravagant mansions with fabulous furnishings and installed bathrooms with hot and cold running water on every floor. Those who earned $10,000 a year and wanted a place in society were expected to have a big new house, a country place, a carriage, and a box at the opera, and, of course, to play host to lavish parties and balls.

  Welcomed at the boat pier on the Hudson River, Hetty settled herself and her bags in the carriage and rode across town. The city founders had “the novel plan of numbering the streets,” noted Isabella Bird, an English traveler visiting at the time. The carriage rolled along the cobblestones, past the posh new Brevoort Hotel at Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street to the older part of town where the streets had names: past the well-paved avenue of Broadway, burgeoning with shops and theaters; past the stately Greek Revival houses of Colonnade Row that were home to Vanderbilts, Astors, and Delanos; past the Society Library on Astor Place where members like Herman Melville borrowed books; past the new Astor Library, free to the public, on Lafayette Place; and on to the Grinnells’ Greek Revival townhouse at the corner of Bond Street and Lafayette.

  The city’s swells might be marching uptown to newer neighborhoods, but successful merchants like the Van Cortlandts, the Tredwells (proud descendants of John Alden and Priscilla Mullens), and the Henry Grinnells (his brother Moses had moved uptown) still maintained their homes downtown, just a few blocks away from Grace Church, where the upper crust still worshipped.

  No one challenged the status of Henry Grinnell and his wife, Sarah Minturn Grinnell. Henry and his two brothers had left behind their Quaker restrictions and made their mark on the world. Joseph, the oldest, had prospered in New York in merchant shipping before he served in Congress and started Wamsutta Mills.

  Their younger brother Moses arrived in the city at the age of fifteen to make his fortune in the family business, completed one term in Congress, presided over the Chamber of Commerce of New York, and served on the commission helping to create Central Park. Not only did he have one of the finest wine cellars in the city, it was said he knew every important and influential person in New York. His wife was the niece of the author Washington Irving.

  Henry Grinnell, whose intimate friends included the Whig senators Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, joined his brother Moses in the family’s prestigious merchant shipping firm, Grinnell and Minturn. Owners of the famous clipper ship Flying Cloud, they were the largest shippers and consignors of whale oil, and were business colleagues of Edward Robinson in New Bedford. Henry Grinnell, a passionate student of geography and generous patron of Arctic explorations, distinguished himself as founder and first president of the American Geographical Society. When Hetty arrived, the latest expedition with his sponsorship was under way, one that would commemorate him in a book and immortalize him on maps when the ship’s crew named a piece of Alaska “Grinnell Land.”

  With her own mother and aunt unable to help her, and with social rules allotting her just three years to become affianced, Henry and Sarah Grinnell invited the girl for her debut season in New York. Sarah, from a prominent merchant shipping family and the mother of four, had recently steered her oldest daughter, Sarah Minturn, into a successful marriage celebrated with a wedding at home. Now she offered to take this young cousin under her wing. She and her married daughter would guide the girl through an endless sea of social calls, teas, parties, dances, and balls, and serve as her chaperone as they scouted for appropriate men. With their help, Hetty would sail through the rigid rounds with grace and dignity. But Hetty did not always follow the prevailing winds.

  Early in the morning upper-crust ladies began their routine, a regime repeated around town from Greenwich Village to Gramercy Park. While husbands set off for their offices, stopping first to order the household food at the market in Tompkins Square, the women prepared for their day.

  After breakfast in the downstairs family room and a leisurely look at the newspapers, instructions were given to the Irish maids. They were to scrub the floors and ovens in the kitchen; clean the coal ashes from the fireplace grates; trim the wicks and fill all the lamps with oil; polish the furniture and dust the ground-floor front parlor, back room, and study, and do the same for the upstairs bedrooms and sitting rooms; wash and iron the clothes; knead and bake the breads for the family and the cakes and sweets for visitors; prepare and cook dinner by 2 p.m., when the head of the house would join them, and ready a supper with high tea later on, or if company was expected, prepare the many courses for a formal dinner to be served at six o’clock.

  Their directives noted, the ladies clambered upstairs, where the maids had prepared the hot water in the new tin tubs connected to the city’s water supply. As they bathed they could hear the noises in the street below: “Glass put in! Glass put in!” an old man shouted, while a fishmonger blew on a tin horn. A few minutes later a voice might call out, “Pots and pans! Pots and pans! Mend your pots and pans!” and another, “Rags for sale!” “I buy old rags!” All day long men came down the street offering their services: One rang a bell to announce he was the knife grinder, another rang to say that he ground horseradish. One blew his whistle to let everyone know he had pigeons for sale, another shouted that he mended umbrellas. And throughout the day horse hoofs clopped, carts clacked, and drivers shouted at the traffic.

  Above the fray, as the women slowly dressed, their maids pulled the laces tight on their corsets, held their hooped underskirts for them to step into, and gently lowered the ruffled dresses over their heads. Downstairs, swaddled in fur-trimmed shawls and fur muffs, with French bonnets and veils firmly tied, the ladies set off in the snapping cold.

  Snuggled under their lap robes, they rode in the parade of carriages up Broadway, ducking when they heard the warning bells of the horse-drawn railway cars thundering down the avenue. At Tiffany’s, Brooks Brothers, and Lord & Taylor, they dashed in to inspect the fancy goods and bargain over the prices. When one Englishwoman gasped at the price of a diamond wristlet and asked, “Who would purchase a trinket costing 5,000 pounds?” the salesman shrugged. “I guess some Southerner would buy it for his wife,” he said.

  At A. T. Stewart’s marble palace, the city’s most talked-about new shop, they marveled at the huge domed skylight and five-story circular court and joined the crowd of women excited to watch a fashion show. As they fingered soft fabrics from Europe or asked the cost of a flounce of lace, the handsome young salesman, one of dozens in the specialized departments around the store, would inform them that, in contrast to other shops, here the prices were fixed. No one seemed to mind; the cash registers jingled as customers spent more than $15,000 a day. Little did anyone know that one day A. T. Stewart’s would borrow money from Hetty.

  Outside, a promenade of ladies in French bonnets and rich silk dresses under their cloaks strolled by, more elegant than those seen in a week in Hyde Park, said an English visitor. Businessmen, more frantic to make money than businessmen anywhere else in the world, rushed past at a dizzying pace, slipping in the slush of mud on the cobblestone streets. Sidestepping men who carried sandwich-board signs on t
heir backs, the crowd tried to avoid the flood of pamphlets and fliers pushed into their hands. In the shop windows, handwritten notices advertised goods, and posters shouted the arrival of new businesses and theatrical performances. Everywhere the noise of carts and horses and angry drivers shattered the air.

  If downtown was crowded with shoppers, far uptown at the edge of the city, behind the Croton Reservoir at Fortieth Street and Fifth Avenue, the streets were packed with sightseers. The Crystal Palace, all glass and iron, beckoned visitors to reach its heights, its steam-powered elevator, invented by Mr. Otis, ready to loft them to the top for spectacular views of the city. At night, its mass of lights glowed like lanterns with Oriental elegance. In the daytime, guests gazed at the finest French tapestries and porcelains and English silver and earthenware, along with Italian, Dutch, and German treasures. A pale copy of the Crystal Palace in London, it nonetheless showed Americans the miracles of art, science, and mechanics. The huge display—“a modern wonder,” said Whitman—gave millions of people a glimpse of the future.

 

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