Empty Mansions

depressing stretch of hallway normally used for patients undergoing physical rehabilitation. Then she was moved again, within that section. Her last regular hospital room, 3K01, was at the end of the corridor, next to the janitor’s closet and the emergency exit. It was a double room, twenty-two feet by fourteen feet, made for two patients but occupied by only Huguette.
    With all the potential views in the world at her disposal, from Paris to the Pacific, she now had a view without a single tree. She could see no sky at all, only in the background the gray-and-tan brick walls of the neighboring wing of the hospital, and in the foreground a maze of industrial compressors and valves, a grim twenty-first-century landscape of air-conditioning units.
    You could say that it no longer mattered: In her second century, her eyesight was failing, and she insisted that a special shade be installed, a blackout shade so no daylight could creep in. But it mattered to her. Huguette often mentioned to her staff how much nicer the view had been at Doctors Hospital, with the river and the mayor’s mansion below.
    After the will was signed, as Bock’s secretary tells the story, they went down the block to a restaurant, where Bock and Kamslerhad a drink to success.

CHERE TANTE HUGUETTE

 
    M ARCH 1968. That’s the last time any Clarks recall seeing their dear Tante Huguette.
    In front of the golden altarpiece of St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue, sixty-one-year-old Huguette walked up after the funeral Mass to offer her condolences. This was the same church where her sister Andrée’s funeral had been held in 1919. Today’s deceased was their half-niece, Katherine Morris Hall, for whom Huguette had been a bridesmaid at this altar in 1924. After a respectful moment, Huguette quietly left the church, without being introduced to the younger relatives.
    That’s the last time, that is to say, any Clarks saw Huguette while she was awake.
    It was more than forty years later, in 2009, when two of Huguette’s relatives showed up unannounced at her hospital room. They had discovered something their 102-year-old aunt didn’t know: Her accountant was a felon.
    As the relatives started to do more research, they had good reason to suspect that Huguette’s money was being stolen, and even to doubt whether she was alive.
    • • •
    The family’s first hint of a problem came from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the museum that holds her father’s art collection and where Huguette exhibited her own work in 1929. Huguette had been a regular donor of $50,000 to $100,000 a year, stepping up to support Clark-related projects. She gave $200,000 for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the W. A. Clark Collection and major support for the $1 million restoration of the Salon Doré, the gilded French room from her childhood home, the Clark mansion at 962 Fifth Avenue.
    The first grand art gallery in Washington, the privately supported Corcoran was perpetually in straitened circumstances, dwarfed by theSmithsonian Institution’s nineteen museums and galleries, which allowed free admission and received millions in federal support. The Corcoran stepped on its reputation in 1989 with Robert Mapplethorpe’s
The Perfect Moment
, an exhibit by the late photographer including homoerotic and sadomasochistic content. Artists canceled exhibitions, and donors pulled back. Over the next ten years, the museum regularly ran deficits.
    In 1999, the Corcoran announced a bold plan to reverse its decline. It would raise money for a $200 million addition designed by the noted architect Frank Gehry, whose well-known projects had raised the profile of institutions such as Spain’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Gehry proposed to update the Corcoran’s image with an annex featuring flowing metal panels, like enormous billowing sails or ribbons of silver. This addition would adorn the Corcoran’s 1897 Beaux Arts building, which faces across Seventeenth Street toward the South Lawn of the White House and the Ellipse, where the National Christmas Tree is decorated. Gehry’s design would radically change the look of the neighborhood. The museum sought a major donation from Huguette, suggesting $10 million. She sent nothing.
    A few years later, in 2003, Corcoran leaders were shocked to read in the newspapers that Huguette had sold Renoir’s
In the Roses
for $23.5 million.In talking with Huguette’s aide, Chris Sattler, the Corcoran staff learned that Huguette had considerable