Empty Mansions

great-great-grandchildren. To Huguette, eleven were her half-grandnieces and grandnephews, and eight were a generation further removed, her half-great-grandnieces and grandnephews. *
    You could say that they had already gotten their share of the copper mining fortune of W. A. Clark. The millions had been divided equally among his five surviving children: Huguette and her four half-siblings from his first marriage. Each of W.A.’s five children who lived to adulthood had received one-fifth of his estate after his death in 1925: equal shares for May, Katherine, Charlie, Will, and Huguette. Huguette got her allowance for a couple of years, and eventually got something extra, inheriting Bellosguardo and the jewels and cash that her mother had received from her prenup. But W.A.’s plan, it seemed, was to treat each of his children equally.
    None of that mattered, under the law. If the nineteen relatives couldpersuade a judge or jury in Surrogate’s Court to overturn the will, they would be allowed to sell Bellosguardo, to sell the paintings, her castles, her dolls. Nothing would go to her nurse Hadassah Peri, her assistant Chris Sattler, her goddaughter Wanda Styka, nothing to the Corcoran museum or Beth Israel hospital—nothing to the people and institutionsshe had supported while she lived. Not only would attorney Wally Bock and accountant Irving Kamsler not get their $500,000 bequests, but they would lose their $3 million commissions as executors, and the chance to reap fees as trustees of a new Bellosguardo Foundation.
    The nineteen accused the attorney and accountant and nurse of fraud, and described Beth Israel as Huguette’s jailer, keeping a scared, vulnerable old woman closeted as part of a plot to take her money. The doctors and hospital had treated Huguette’s cancer, the family alleged, but hadn’t treated an underlying psychiatric disorder that had caused Huguette to remain in her home with untreated cancer in the first place. The attorney for the nineteen, John R. Morken, wrote to his clients that their aim was not financial, but to ensure “that Huguette’s true wishes are honored and that justice is done.”
    Fourteen of the nineteen acknowledged in court papers thatthey had never met Huguette. Of the other five,the last time each of them had met her was in 1957, 1954, 1952, 1951, and “during the second World War.” A few of the relatives said they thought they had gotten a glimpse of her at the funeral for her half-sister’s daughter, back in 1968. A few of the relatives did have limited contact with her. Eight of the nineteen said they had visited Bellosguardo in the 1940s, 1950s, or 1960s, usually when Anna and Huguette were not present. They had been awestruck by the beauty of the property, had played tennis, and sometimes got a peek inside the great house.
    Ten of the nineteen said they had sent cards or letters to Huguette for Christmas or birthdays, and four had received some kind of reply. Most of these relatives were far younger than Huguette. She was born in 1906, and they between 1921 and 1964, so in some cases their parents had sent Christmas cards or lilies, or had received holiday phone calls from Huguette into the 2000s. Huguette on these calls was always very interested in their families, referring to the children and grandchildren by name.
    But in the past half a century, these relatives had only occasionally reached out to their elderly aunt, and she had not reached out to them. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Huguette did not call her relatives, as she called her goddaughter Wanda, to give reassurance that she was fine.
    Of these nineteen, the one who came closest to having a relationship with Huguette was André Baeyens, her half-grandnephew, an elegant Frenchman who served as France’s consul general in New York, as his father had before him. André approached Huguette in the late 1990s, after her friend Madame Pierre introduced herself at an event at the consulate. He was writing a book in French about Huguette’s father, the senator. She engaged easily with André, calling him about ten or twelve times from her hospital room through the early 2000s, though as usual keeping control by not giving him her phone number or telling him she was in the hospital. He would call Madame Pierre, and Huguette would call him back. They never met. When André finished his book in 2005, a fond family memoir of “the senator who loved France,” he sent it to