THE RICH RECLUSE OF HERALD SQUARE

AROUND HALF PAST two o’clock on the morning of March 6, 1931, during the great depression, a middle-aged attorney named Morgan J. O’Brien, Jr., who lived with his elderly parents at 729 Park Avenue, was awakened by the ringing of his bedside telephone. He was afraid that it was a personal call and that it might be bringing him bad news. His father and mother, both of them in their late seventies, had gone South for their health a few days earlier, and he had been worrying about the strain the trip might have imposed on them. The call, however, was a business one and although it was from an undertaker, it did not turn out to be bad news. The undertaker gave his name, which was P. B. McDonnell, and said he was calling from the Herald Square Hotel, on West Thirty-fourth Street. He had been asked by the manager to arrange for the burial of an aged lady, Miss Mary E. Mayfield, who had died there the day before. Miss Mayfield, the undertaker went on, had lived with her sister and the two of them had occupied the same two-room suite in the hotel for the past twenty-five years. Miss Mayfield was ninety-one years old and the sister was ninety-three. The sister had identified herself as Mrs. Benjamin Wood and, upon being asked by the undertaker for a reference, had said that Judge Morgan J. O’Brien used to be her attorney. The under-

taker indicated to Mr. O’Brien that he thought she was some kind of crazy recluse.

Mr. O’Brien explained impatiently that he was not Judge O’Brien, that the Judge was his father, that the Judge had more or less retired and would be out of town for at least a month. The undertaker was persistent, though circumspect. He said that Mrs. Wood didn’t look to him as if she had much money, and that while he would be willing to attend to her sister if Judge O’Brien really was a friend of the family’s, he just couldn’t afford to risk the expense otherwise. After all, he concluded, the times were hard for everybody. Although he was in a hurry to get back to sleep, Mr. O’Brien, in an orderly way, made a note of Mrs. Wood’s name, of the undertaker’s name, and of the gist of the conversation, and promised to get in touch with the undertaker when he reached his office, in his father’s law firm, the next morning. Later on, Mr. O’Brien had reason to be glad he had made those notes, for Mrs. Wood was in need of somebody to help her take care of a hoard of what many people lacked that year. Tucked in her clothes, in an old shoe box, and in various other hiding places she had $752,200 in cash, $175,000 in securities that were, even in those times, sound, and jewelry worth $75,000.

Judge O’Brien’s law firm was one of the most distinguished and influential ones in the city, and it had a magnitude of nomenclature second to none. Its name was O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early. It occupied 9000 square feet of floor space at 39 Broadway, and besides eleven active senior members and two inactive ones, it had on its staff fifteen associates, four law clerks, eighteen secretaries and stenographers, two file clerks, a cashier-bookkeeper, two telephone operators, a receptionist, and five office boys. Judge O’Brien had sat on the New York State Supreme Court bench from 1887 to 1915 and had served in the Appellate Division of that court for ten of those years. He had been a faithful Tammany man for more than half a century, and still was.

When the younger O’Brien reached the offices of the firm that morning, he mentioned the telephone conversation with the undertaker to his father’s secretary, an elderly man named J. C. Walsh. Mr. Walsh told him that Mrs. Benjamin Wood might easily be the widow of the Benjamin Wood who had been a rich man in the seventies and eighties and had owned the New York Daily News until around 1900, when it was sold to Frank A. Munsey. When Mr. O’Brien heard this, he grew impatient again, but not to get back to sleep. In those wretched days of 1931, when so many people were idle, even a law firm like O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early was not as busy as it felt it ought to be. The firm held a conference forthwith, and the decision was that the younger O’Brien should telephone the elder O’Brien for information and advice. The younger O’Brien did so, and the elder O’Brien told his son that when he was a lawyer, in the 1880s he had known Mrs. Wood quite well, both professionally and socially. She had been one of the beauties of New York in those days, he said, and, in addition to that, a smart businesswoman. Nobody had heard of her for many years now. The gossip around town was, he believed, that she had converted her fortune into cash shortly before the panic of 1907 and had then disappeared.

The younger O’Brien found himself thinking more and more about Mrs. Wood’s plight. He hoped she could be considered a client of the firm, because if she was it would be easier to help her, and he wanted to help her. He asked his father if, in his opinion, Mrs. Wood could be considered a client. The elder O’Brien said in a regretful tone that he hardly thought she could be but that he felt it was his son’s duty to call on her, because she so obviously needed help and her mention of the O’Brien name to the undertaker might well have been a call for help; also, the elder O’Brien said, it might be a good idea, when he went to see Mrs. Wood, to take along a member of the firm’s staff named Harold G. Wentworth, who specialized in the handling of estates. Mr. O’Brien still remembers that his father said to him, “Of course, she may be destitute. If so, I think the firm should underwrite the cost of the funeral of her sister, Miss Mayfield, just for old times’ sake. After all, your mother and I often entertained Mrs. Wood and her sister at our home. But it does not appear to me to be likely that Mrs. Wood is destitute.”

Before O’Brien and Wentworth took a taxi to Mrs. Wood’s hotel, O’Brien telephoned the undertaker and told him the firm would see that the burial of Miss Mayfield was paid for one way or another. When the two lawyers reached the hotel, they first talked to the manager and some of the employees, and found out a few things about the sisters. The manager had been at the hotel for six or seven years and had never seen either Miss Mayfield or Mrs. Wood. To the best of his knowledge, they hadn’t been out of their suite in all that time. They had paid their bills in cash ever since he had been at the hotel. His records showed that they had moved into two adjoining rooms on the fifth floor in 1907, along with Mrs. Wood’s daughter, Miss Emma, who had died in a hospital, in 1928, at the age of seventy-one. A Negro elevator operator, who had been with the hotel for nineteen years, vaguely remembered having seen all three ladies at rare intervals when he first went to work there, but he didn’t know anything much about them and had never known which was which. An Irish maid took care of the fifth floor; she had been there only a couple of months and hadn’t got into the sisters’ rooms at all, she told the lawyers. Twice, she said, she had persuaded the ladies to hand over soiled sheets and towels and accept clean ones, but they hadn’t let her past the door. A Negro bell captain said it had been his custom for a number of years to knock on the door once a day and ask the ladies if they wanted anything. Usually, they would send him out for one thing or another and pay him in cash, tipping him a dime. They seemed to live on evaporated milk, coffee, crackers, bacon, eggs, and an occasional fish, he said. Once in a while, he had been inside the parlor of the suite, but never in the bedroom. He said they had fixed up a makeshift kitchenette in the bathroom, where they made the coffee and cooked the bacon and eggs, but not the fish. They ate the fish raw. Miss Mayfield slept on a couch in the parlor and Mrs. Wood presumably slept in the bedroom. From time to time, Mrs. Wood asked the bell captain to buy Copenhagen snuff, Havana cigars, and jars of petroleum jelly. Both ladies smoked the cigars and used the snuff, he said, and he had the impression that Mrs. Wood spent hours every day massaging her face with the petroleum jelly. On the afternoon of the day of Miss Mayfield’s death, the bell captain had seen Miss Mayfield stretched out on the couch in the parlor, had heard her moaning, and had asked Mrs. Wood if she wanted him to get a doctor. In a meandering way, Mrs. Wood had said that her sister was sick but that there was no use getting a doctor—that she had called a doctor when her daughter Emma was sick a few years before and he had taken her to a hospital and she had died, and that consequently there was no use getting a doctor now for poor Mary. Nevertheless, the manager, upon being informed of this by the bell captain, had asked the house physician of the nearby Hotel McAlpin to stop in to see Miss Mayfield that afternoon. The doctor was soon convinced that she was suffering from cancer of the stomach, and she had died while he was there. A medical examiner from downtown had released the body to the undertaker for burial.

Their heads swirling with snuff, cigars, stocks, bonds, and petroleum jelly, the two lawyers went up to the fifth floor of the hotel and knocked at the door. The undertaker let them in. The body of Miss Mayfield, covered with a sheet, was still on the couch. The undertaker said Mrs. Wood had locked herself in the bedroom and wouldn’t come out. Neither of the two lawyers ever forgot their first encounter with Mrs. Wood. “Perhaps after five or ten minutes of hammering,” Wentworth later testified in court, “the door opened, and the figure of an aged woman appeared. Her hair was very much dishevelled and she had a pronounced stoop. She was perhaps five feet tall, with the stoop—very feeble. She had a dirty old hotel towel pinned around the upper part of her body, which was apparently the only covering that she had on, and the lower portion of her body was covered with material that enclosed it and was held together with pins or something. It was not a dress, as we know it. She had considerable difficulty in walking. She walked very, very slowly, and she came over to a chair and invited Mr. O’Brien, Jr., and myself to sit down. . . . She appeared to be unable to read anything, and the way that came up was this: Certain papers—she was desirous of giving certain papers to Mr. O’Brien, Jr., and myself, and she brought out an old shoe box in which these papers were kept, and she asked Mr. O’Brien, Jr., and myself to look over various of the papers in order to find out what papers she wished to give us, and she said at the time that she could not see. She also was extremely deaf. It was almost necessary to shout into her ear to make her hear. . . . She referred at one time to ten hundred shares, and at another time to eleven hundred shares, of stock in the Union Pacific Railroad Company, stating that she owned it. She also referred to a ten-thousand-dollar bond of the Union Pacific Railroad Company and, in answer to a question as to where this property was, she pointed to the inner room and said that she kept it locked up in there.”

“The parlor was unbelievably dirty and dusty,” O’Brien has since said in recalling the same scene. “The undertaker was working on the body of Miss Mayfield while Wentworth and I kept hammering on the bedroom door. The parlor was crammed with an accumulation of old newspapers, cracker boxes, balls of used string, stacks of old wrapping paper, and several large trunks. When Mrs. Wood came out, I told her my name. She sat down in a rocking chair and started massaging her face with this petroleum jelly we had heard about, and I realized she was rather deaf. I kept shouting my name at her, and finally she seemed to understand what I was saying and she got up and came over to me. She was very little and was bent over like a question mark, but you could see she had once been a pretty woman, and her complexion was smooth and unwrinkled. She couldn’t see very well, apparently. She came up to me and felt my face all over with her hands, and then she drew back and exclaimed, ‘You’re not Judge O’Brien at all!’ I tried to tell her I was Judge O’Brien’s son, and she finally seemed to understand that. She sat down again and lighted a long, thin cigar. She talked fairly sensibly and amiably for a while, although in a rather wandering fashion. She showed us some Union Pacific bonds and some uncashed dividend checks. She said her daughter and her sister had both had money in their own right and had willed it to her. She hinted that she had a good deal of cash in the bedroom. I asked her if she had a bank account, and she said that she didn’t have one now but that she used to have one at the Morton Trust Company. She told me she had no relatives and no friends. But then, all at once, she sort of switched, and became very irate and hysterical. She called me an impostor and a crook, said I was just after her money, like everybody else, said she didn’t like my voice or my looks, and didn’t want a lawyer anyway. She told me to get out. Then she snatched up the shoe box and the bonds and papers, and hobbled with startling speed into the bedroom and closed and locked the door. Wentworth and I hung around for a while, banging on the door and trying to get her to come out, but she wouldn’t, so we finally went back to the office. Frankly, we didn’t know what to do.”

The firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early spent a good part of the rest of that day deciding what to do. It was able to find out from the Union Pacific Railroad Company that Miss Mayfield and Mrs. Wood owned stocks and bonds in that company worth around a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars and that they had not cashed their dividend checks for ten or twelve years. From other sources, the firm learned that Mrs. Wood herself, rather than her husband, had sold the Daily News to Mr. Munsey; her husband had died in 1900 and had willed the paper and whatever else he possessed to her. As nearly as the firm could figure out, Mr. Munsey had paid her almost a quarter of a million dollars for the newspaper. People who seemed to know about the deal remembered that she had demanded, and received, spot cash from Munsey. At the Guaranty Trust Company, a senescent teller remembered Mrs. Wood from her Morton Trust days and remembered, too, that in 1907 she had drawn out all her money, amounting to nearly a million dollars, in cash, had put it into a large string shopping bag, and had never come back to the bank again after that.

In the beginning, the law firm had been warmheartedly willing to help Mrs. Wood even if she was poor. It was now warmheartedly willing to help her even if she was rich. Yet after revealing to O’Brien in a tantalizing way that she had a fortune in securities, and hinting that she might have a large store of cash—and, on top of that, indicating in all sorts of ways that she was incapable of handling her financial affairs herself—she had unaccountably accused him of being an impostor and a crook, had stated that she didn’t want a lawyer, had ordered him out, and had locked herself in her bedroom. Consequently, she was not a client but only a prospective client.

Perplexed, but still willing to help Mrs. Wood, the firm put all its heads together and decided that it could be tragic indeed if Mrs. Wood, needing help so badly, did not avail herself of the firm’s willingness to help her. If a lawyer goes around barefacedly proposing to prospective clients that they become his, he is violating the lawyers’ code of ethics. Under this code, he is not required to sit in his office and wait for prospective clients to offer themselves to him, but when he runs across a prospective client, he is permitted, under the code, only to ingratiate himself with the prospective client and impress upon the prospective client the extent of his talents. The behavior of ethical lawyers at such times resembles in many ways the behavior of inhibited males toward prospective mates; courtship among living organisms, all the way from human beings down to crustaceans and insects, is marked by a bizarre and pathetic indirection, and so are the ways of ethical lawyers with prospective clients. The Encyclopoedia Britannica lists a host of living organisms whose behavior in courtship is pathetic but only a few whose behavior is as bizarre as a large and ethical law firm’s has to be when it is ingratiating itself with a rich nonagenarian lady who is badly in need of help but fitfully inclined to think she can get along without it. When the firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy Memhard & Early undertook to convice Mrs. Wood of its concern for her welfare, it may, with some embarrassment have felt a little like the male of the insect called the empis and at other times like a male fiddler crab. According to the Britannica, the male empis, approaching the female empis, manufactures a glistening balloon, blowing it up until it is bigger than he is, and putting into it tiny bright objects—“which renders him and his gift very conspicuous.” The male fiddler crab has one enormous and gaudy claw, and when in the presence of a female fiddler crab, says the Britannica, “he stands on tiptoe and brandishes his claw in the air, frequently for long periods of time.”

The younger O’Brien could see that he might not be the man for Mrs. Wood, because she seemed to have taken a distinct dislike to him. The firm agreed with O’Brien but felt that Wentworth might stand a chance with her, because Mrs. Wood had volunteered no estimate of her regard for him. The firm decided to send Wentworth back to see her again that day, and off he went, encumbered by a glistening briefcase and a bunch of bright red roses. At the same time, Martin Conboy, who was then the active head of the firm and two years later became United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, made a decision that, if it did not serve to ingratiate the firm with Mrs. Wood, may well have impressed her with its talents. He telephoned a private detective agency and asked that two good men be instructed to hire a room next to Mrs. Wood’s and keep a twenty-four-hour watch on her until further notice. The fact that these private detectives ran up a bill of more than seven thousand dollars just for watching is an indication of the thoroughness with which the firm protected Mrs. Wood.

Wentworth called on Mrs. Wood, and after that he found himself drawn to her again and again by a desire to help her. Within a few weeks, she became the firm’s client not once but several times. A kindly man with a gentle approach, Wentworth was a faithful suitor. But Mrs. Wood was fickle. She was never a client for more than twenty-four hours, and sometimes she was a client for only a few minutes. She appeared to appreciate the first bunch of red roses he brought her. She grabbed up an empty coffee tin and, after filling it with water in the bathroom, stuck the roses in it and set it on one of the trunks in her parlor. Wentworth took her a bunch of red roses almost every time he went to see her, which was almost every day. Sometimes she seemed pleased with them, and stuck them in the coffee tin, and sometimes she snapped their heads off and threw them over her shoulder. Wentworth never knew what to expect, but he kept going back to see her. He sat with her for hours at a time. They were an odd-looking and odd-acting couple. Anybody watching them through the transom—as the private detectives were— would have found it hard to tell what they saw in each other. While Wentworth talked at the top of his voice, Mrs. Wood would sit in her rocking chair smoking one of the long, thin cigars and, with her free hand, massaging her face with petroleum jelly, a jar of which she kept handy on top of a splintery old orange crate. Sometimes she would stop the smoking and massaging and munch crackers and sip evaporated milk out of the can, and every few days she would eat a raw fish in front of Wentworth’s eyes. He went on shouting at her about uncashed dividend checks, hoarded cash, the likelihood of robbery, the security of safe-deposit boxes, and the concern that was felt for her at O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early. Wentworth tried to persuade her to let the maid clean the rooms, and in time she agreed to having the parlor done, but she wouldn’t let the maid or anybody else into the bedroom. When he suggested to her with elaborate circumlocution that it might be wise for her to have her stocks and bonds and cash put in a safe place, she would shake her head from side to side and languidly puff on her cigar.

One day while Wentworth was yelling at Mrs. Wood about the wills of her daughter and her sister and about the regrettable fact that they had never been submitted to the Surrogate’s Court for probate, she abruptly handed them over to him and asked him to take care of them. Wentworth took this to be the answer to the question that ethics had kept him from popping, but as he held the wills in his hands and started to express his and the firm’s pleasure at having her as a client, she changed her mind, grabbed the wills back, hobbled into her bedroom, and locked the door. Other days followed in which Mrs. Wood would simply bring out the wills and allow Wentworth to hold them for a while and then snatch them back. She dallied around with interesting batches of bonds in the same fashion. A day came when she let him put the wills in his briefcase and go off with them, but early the next morning, before the Surrogate’s Court opened, he got a telephone call from the hotel maid, who said Mrs. Wood had asked her to tell him that if he didn’t bring the wills back to her immediately she would have him arrested for robbery. He took the wills back and Mrs. Wood resumed her role of non-client. By this time, it was the middle of June. The Wentworth-Wood affair had been going on for more than three months and the firm owed the private detectives thirty-five hundred dollars when a fortuitous circumstance led the firm to give up the effort to help Mrs. Wood in the way it had been trying to help her. It found itself able to help her just as effectively as it had wished to from the beginning, but in a different way.

The firm had not told the newspapers that there was a ninety-three-year-old rich recluse, a former belle of New York, living in squalor at the Herald Square Hotel, eating odd bits of food and smoking cigars while private detectives watched over her. Word of it got around nevertheless, with the result that an elderly man named Otis Wood turned up at the offices of the firm one day, identified himself as a nephew of Mrs. Wood, and said that he desired to help her. He was told that the firm would be glad to help him help her but unfortunately could consent to do so only if he desired to become a client of the firm. Mr. Wood became a client.

Otis Wood was a son of Fernando Wood, who had been Mayor of New York in the fifties and sixties, and was a brother of Mrs. Wood’s husband. As far as the firm could determine at that time, he and his relatives were Mrs. Wood’s closest kin. Besides Otis, there were three other sons of Fernando in New York, all of them substantial businessmen, and several grandchildren, and before long the firm was representing a cozy bevy of ten Woods. Then it turned out that Mrs. Wood’s husband had had a son by an earlier marriage and that he had had some children, who were thus stepgrandchildren of Mrs. Wood. This group of relatives numbered five and was headed by a Mrs. Blanche Wood Shields. The Shields relatives hired a law firm of their own named Talley & Lamb. It was possible that these two sets of relatives would fight over Mrs. Wood’s money someday, but during the initial effort to assist Mrs. Wood they stood together, because they and their lawyers had agreed that the only way to give Mrs. Wood real help was to have her declared an incompetent, so that somebody could be appointed who would be legally empowered to take care of Mrs. Wood’s money, and, in order to do so, to take it away from her—if need be, by force.

The firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early, representing Otis and the other Woods, filed the necessary petitions in the New York State Supreme Court, and on August 4th, Justice John F. Carew ordered that a sheriff’s jury be impanelled to decide whether or not Mrs. Wood was an incompetent. A week earlier, at the request of the firm, Justice William Harmon Black had appointed a special guardian for Mrs. Wood. The special guardian was empowered to try to persuade her to let him help her but was not empowered to help her by force, pending the outcome of the incompetency proceedings. He was a lawyer named Edward T. Corcoran, and although he got along better with Mrs. Wood than anybody else had up to that time, he was able to persuade her to turn over to him no more than $50,000 in securities and a measly $50,000 in cash. Early in September, she was declared an incompetent by the sheriff’s jury, and Otis Wood was named “committee of her person and property,” which meant looking after her physical welfare and, if necessary, forcing her to allow him to take the rest of her money away from her and handle it for her. In spite of everything, she managed to hang on to it for a month after she had been declared an incompentent. She was under the care of a doctor and two nurses, was feeling better, and was growing increasingly alert and suspicious. Finally, on October 6th, after repeated failures to persuade her to be sensible, a suite of rooms was rented for her directly below the ones she had occupied for so many years. With the help of the two nurses and in the presence of three or four relatives from both factions, and their attorneys, she was moved downstairs. Then her former bedroom was searched and $247,200 in cash, mostly in $1,000 and $5,000 bills, was found in a shoe box she kept there. None of the people who counted and re-counted the shoe-box money thought they would ever see so much cash again, but two days later the same people watched the nurses slip an oilcloth packet out from under Mrs. Wood’s dress when she was asleep, and when they counted what was in the packet it came to $500,000 in $10,000 bills. The rest of her stocks and bonds turned up here and there around the vacated rooms during succeeding days as the search went on.

As soon as all the cash had been securely deposited in various banks, some of it began to circulate. The first disbursement went, appropriately, to the firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early. The firm applied to Supreme Court Justice Untermyer for a fee of $10,000 for helping Mrs. Wood, this sum to come out of Mrs. Wood’s money. Justice Untermyer reduced the claim to $8000. Talley & Lamb asked for $1500 and got half of that. A psychiatrist who had testified before the sheriff’s jury that Mrs. Wood was incompetent asked for $2200 and got $1150, and another psychiatrist, who had testified to the same thing, asked for $1525 and got $810. The medical man who had attended to Mrs. Wood’s physical needs asked for $535 and got all of it. James G. Donovan, the commissioner who had presided over the incompetency proceedings, asked for $1000 and got $300. Corcoran, the special guardian, asked for $5000 and got $3500. The detective agency that had been watching over Mrs. Wood at the request of Mr. Conboy asked for $7755.69 and got $6323.69. There were a few other relatively small miscellaneous disbursements. All in all, in the six months after the undertaker telephoned O’Brien, the fortunes of Mrs. Wood were diminished by the sum of $22,268.59 over and above what she had had to spend during that period for evaporated milk, coffee, eggs, bacon, fish, crackers, rent, cigars, and petroleum jelly. However, Justice Untermyer had, in a way, saved her $8239 by cutting down the claims.

There was now nothing much for the two sets of relatives and their lawyers to do but wait. Mrs. Wood lived on in her new suite of rooms at the hotel under the care of the two nurses. The whole city had heard of her by this time, and hundreds of non-relatives tried to see her in order to ask her for some of the money she no longer had with her, but they were turned away by the nurses. The newspapers reported that “her tantrums are sometimes heard along the corridors” and that “she glowers through old spectacles at strange people who flit in and out of her rooms.” Otis Wood said of her, “She is small, you know, and can move very quickly when she wants to. She has an amazing strength. She is very courteous, you know, very precise in etiquette. To talk with her is like going back into another age when people were more careful about little things than they are now. She is a curious mixture of sentiment and hard sense. She wanted two things today, her photograph folio of old pictures taken in the fifties and sixties and a sight of her bankbook. We are, of course, letting her have both.”

Mrs. Wood’s mental and physical health continued to improve as the last months of 1931 went by. In November, a Times reporter went to see her and she talked lucidly about the past. She told him she had made a lot of money in the stock market before the panic of 1907. “My broker was named Frank Work, and he was a very handsome man,” she said. “I sold out everything before the panic struck. I did quite well, you know, and it seems very strange they should call me incompetent. I made money and I kept it. So many people whom everyone considers quite competent can’t do that.” She said that she and her daughter and sister were “tired of everything” when they moved into the hotel in 1907, and that, except for going out occasionally to shop during the first few years, they saw nobody but the bellboys and maids. Her nurses reported that “she’s like a willful child and is at times difficult to handle.” She continued to smoke the long, thin cigars and to massage her face with petroleum jelly.

While waiting, the relatives and their lawyers conducted a search to make sure Mrs. Wood hadn’t hidden some more money somewhere. It was about as thorough as a search can be. After going through the five trunks that were in her rooms, they took apart every piece of furniture and burrowed into the plaster of the walls in places where it sounded hollow when they rapped on it with their knuckles. Then they went through the fourteen trunks she kept in the basement of the hotel and the forty trunks she had stored in an uptown warehouse. Then it occurred to one of them that Mrs. Wood might have hidden some money in her sister’s coffin before it was closed and taken away for interment in Calvary Cemetery. This evidently struck O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early as a reasonable possibility. In the presence of the long-suffering Wentworth and a lawyer representing the Shields set of relatives, the coffin was dug up and the same undertaker who had attended to the funeral opened it. A few minutes later, he reported to the lawyers that there was nothing in it but the body.

After that, little happened until a day in January, 1932, when one of Mrs. Wood’s nurses decided to throw away three boxes of moldy crackers Mrs. Wood had brought with her when they moved her out of her old rooms, and had insisted on keeping close at hand ever since. The nurse put them in the garbage can while Mrs. Wood was asleep. Then, having a second thought, she took them out and looked under the stale crackers in each box. In one of them she found a beautiful diamond necklace, which, when appraised the next day, was said to be worth around $40,000. The nurse told her about the necklace and spoke to her reproachfully about hiding things. She had a minor tantrum and then said, “Please take good care of that necklace. It cost Mr. Wood a great deal of money when he bought it for me.” It was turned over to the lawyers and afterward sold to the jeweller who offered more for it than anybody else. Mrs. Wood lived on for another two months. Early in March, she caught a cold that developed into pneumonia. She seemed to be stubbornly recovering from the pneumonia, but on the morning of March 12th she had a heart attack. She died that afternoon. Among the people who came to look at her as she lay in her coffin in the hotel suite was the younger O’Brien. The memory of that visit still has the power to make him speak of her in a silver-tongued fashion. “You could see what an extraordinarily pretty woman she once was when you saw her lying there at peace with all the world,” he said recently. “Her complexion, in spite of her age, was as creamy and pink and as unwrinkled as any I have ever seen. It was like tinted ivory. Her profile was like a lovely cameo.” One of the many disbursements that were made out of her estate before it was at last divided up among her closest kin covered the cost of the funeral. It was a moderately priced one. She was buried in Calvary Cemetery, not far from the recently opened grave of her sister.

The firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early had for some time before Mrs. Wood’s death been facing with stiff upper lips the melancholy fact that their clients, the Woods, stood little or no chance of inheriting any of the estate. The other set of relatives—the descendants of Benjamin Wood, by his first marriage—obviously had a sounder claim than Otis Wood and the other descendants of Benjamin’s brother Fernando. The relationship between the firm of Talley & Lamb, representing the descendants of Benjamin Wood, and O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early turned out to be a friendly one because the two firms shared a solicitude for Mrs. Wood. Otis Wood’s status as committee of Mrs. Wood’s person and property was not interfered with until after her death. At that time, Talley & Lamb moved in court to have one of its clients appointed to take Otis’s place, on the ground that its candidate was closer kin to her than Otis. The motion was granted without much argument. The new administrator, represented by Talley & Lamb, had to have an accounting of the handling of the estate up to then by the committee, represented by O’B., etc. The accounting proceedings were heard by Francis J. Sullivan, a referee appointed by Justice Black, and the transcript of the record came to 1,708 pages. Among the claims on the estate that Talley & Lamb questioned, but not convincingly enough, in the opinion of the referee, was one for $30,000 to be paid to O’B., etc., for representing Otis Wood during the period of his administration of the estate. When the hearing was over, O’B., etc., was paid the $30,000 and, in addition, $750 for representing Otis during the hearing itself, which had consisted mostly of arguments between the two sets of counsel as to whether or not Otis had administered the estate competently. Talley & Lamb also received $7500 for representing the new administrator during the hearing. Otis himself was paid $5000 for his Services as committee. Sullivan, the referee, was paid $12,000 for being the referee. Later on, when, owing to an unforeseen development in the squabble over the estate, the courts appointed the Public Administrator to supplant Talley &Lamb’s client, Talley & Lamb and their client were paid $17,500 for their Services during the client’s administration and during the accounting that the Public Administrator had to have before he could take over.

The unforeseen development grew out of the revelation of a secret Mrs. Wood had carefully and successfully kept since her girlhood. When she was in her teens, around the eighteen-fifties, she adopted the name of Mayfield, because she liked the sound of it. When she was married to Benjamin Wood, in 1867, the stories of the marriage in the New York newspapers said she was “the former Ida E. Mayfield, daughter of Judge Thomas Henry Mayfield, of Louisiana,” and that she had been a New Orleans belle before she became a New York belle. She not only changed her own name to Mayfield but also changed her mother’s and sister’s names to Mayfield. In 1883, when her mother died, she was buried in Calvary Cemetery as “Ann Mary Crawford, widow of Thomas Henry Mayfield.” Actually, Mrs. Wood was born plain Ellen Walsh, and her father was an immigrant peddler from Ireland who, after a stopover in Malden, Massachusetts, died in California in 1864.

Mrs. Wood’s secret was publicly revealed some six months after her death by Edward T. Corcoran, the lawyer who had served for a brief time as her special guardian before she was declared incompetent. He had got some hint of the truth from his conversations with Mrs. Wood and from some of the family records she had shown him, had kept mum about it, and had gone to Ireland a few days after she died and hunted up two brothers named Kennedy—Hugh and Michael—who operated the well-known Kennedy’s Bakery in Dublin. He convinced them that they were cousins of Mrs. Wood and possibly her closest kin, and they became his clients, along with a cousin he found in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Then he returned to New York and put in their claims for the estate. More than a hundred other claims had been filed with the Surrogate by that time, most of them by Mayfields from the Deep South who said they remembered Mrs. Wood when she was a New Orleans belle and they were just little tiny chillun. At about the time Corcoran was hunting down the Kennedys in Dublin, O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early, in making an independent investigation of Mrs. Wood’s ancestry, discovered her true name and began trying diligently to find some cousins in Salem, Massachusetts, where she was brought up. Mr. Conboy himself went up to Salem and came back with five Salem cousins as clients. A few days later, he went over to Elizabeth, New Jersey, and came back with two more cousins as clients. The legalistically delightful case was at last closed in 1939 when these seven cousins and the three represented by Corcoran inherited the entire estate of Mrs. Wood, amounting to $84,490.92 apiece, minus lawyers’ fees of approximately twenty-five percent to Corcoran, and to O’Brien, etc. As the younger O’Brien remarked to another member of the firm when the whole thing was over, “It just goes to show that it is a good thing for a lawyer to answer his telephone no matter what time of night it rings.”