The Richest Woman in America Read Online Free PDF Page B

ship’s crew named a piece of Alaska “Grinnell Land.”
    With her own mother and aunt unable to help her, and withsocial 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 readya 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