Empty Mansions

Huguette had “very few interests, if any,” and clearly didn’t understand what she owned, as shown by “living a reclusive life in a hospital, while you have enormous wealth and five residences you could live in.” She displayed, Huguette’s nephew summed up, “an irrational pattern of just throwing money away.”
    Proving incompetence is a high hurdle. The presumption that the signer of a will is competent, as one court put it, “cannot be destroyed by showing a few isolated acts, foibles, idiosyncrasies, moral or mental irregularities or departures from the normal unless they directly bear upon and have influenced” the writing and signing of the will. Even if the family proved that Huguette had some mental illness, that wouldn’t bar her from signing a valid will. (An estimated one in six Americans would qualify for at least one personality disorder.) The mentally ill can sign a will during a period of lucidity. Under New York law, all that she would have had to understand when signing the will was what property she owned, her relationship to the beneficiaries, and that the will would hand over that property to them after she died. The law requires less evidence of competence to sign a will than it does to sign a contract.
    The relatives could point to dolls and dollhouses, to Smurfs and SpongeBob, to extravagant spending on empty mansions, to the millions given away to Hadassah, to her self-exile at Beth Israel. But would that be enough to show that she was incompetent?
    There was nothing in the medical record, nothing before Huguettesigned either will, to indicate any mental confusion or dementia. The record does show decades of Huguette’s not bending to the pleas of her attorneys or the hospital or the Corcoran.
    The beneficiaries also had witnesses who knew Huguette, witnesses who did not benefit from the will, who could testify to her mental alertness and clear memory even years after the will was signed. They had, for example, the neurologist.
CUTE AS PIE

 
    I T WAS O CTOBER 25, 2005, six months after Huguette signed her last will. On that Tuesday morning, notes in her medical chart showed her to be in an “acute confusional state”—delirious, agitated. She was hearing piano music. A stroke was possible. Her doctor called for a specialist.
    In her more than ten years at Beth Israel Medical Center, Dr. Louise Klebanoff had heard of the “little old lady who lived in the hospital.” Now she was finally meeting her.
    The neurologist nudged ninety-nine-year-old Huguette awake from her morning nap. The patient opened her blue-steel eyes, seeing an unfamiliar face. “Leave me alone,” Huguette said irritably in her high French accent, and closed her eyes.
    The doctor studied the chart and looked closely at the white-haired woman. Weighing barely eighty-five pounds, she was dressed in a housecoat and three white cashmere sweaters, and she had surprisingly soft, girlish skin and rosy cheeks. Skilled at cajoling older patients, Dr. Klebanoff gently persuaded Huguette to wake up and to play along with her mental status exam. She tickled her to test her sensory reactions. She gave her simple commands: Close your eyes. Hold up your arms. Wiggle your fingers.
    Huguette complied, and the doctor moved up to more complex commands. Clap your hands three times and stick out your tongue.
    “Leave me alone!” Huguette shouted, pulling the covers over her head.
    This turtle wasn’t coming out of her shell. Dr. Klebanoff said she’d come back tomorrow.
    The next morning, Huguette brightened up immediately when she recognized the smiling doctor. She sat up in bed and stepped through the tests with ease. She knew who she was and where she was and when it was. Huguette was very hard of hearing, but she was attentive. Herspeech was clear, her reflexes quick. Her lab results and chest X-ray were clean. She was normal in every way, neurologically.
    “She seemed cute as pie,” Dr. Klebanoff said later, “perfectly content.”
    Huguette just had a cold, the doctor wrote on the chart, and was dehydrated, causing a temporary electrolyte imbalance, which can bring on confusion or hallucinations. With her fluids back to normal, she was fine.
    The women talked for another twenty minutes. Huguette gave the doctor a tour of her tabletop model castles from Japan with their brocade fabric interiors. She took out her photo album: Here was her dear mother, smiling shyly in an elegant summer dress. Her dear father, the