Empty Mansions

Huguette took seriously Miss Clara Spence’s admonition to “cultivate imagination”—even to the point of being concerned that “the little people are banging their heads!”
    We will never know why Huguette was, as she might say, “peculiar.” The people in her inner circle say they have no idea. Outsiders speculate. It was being the daughter of an older father! It was her sister’s death! Or her mother’s! The wealth! It was autism or Asperger’s or a childhood trauma! Easy answers fail because the question assumes that personalities have a single determinant. Whatever caused her shyness, her limitations of sociability or coping, her fears—of strangers, of kidnapping, of needles, of another French Revolution—Huguette found a situation that worked for her, a modern-day “Boo” Radley, shut up inside by choice, safe from a world that can hurt.
    Like her attention-grabbing father and her music-loving mother, both strong-willed and private in their own ways, Huguette was a formidable personality who lived life as she wanted, always on her own terms. Far from being controlled by her money men, she drove them to frustration. Though she was firm, she was always kind. It would have been easy for anyone born into her cosseted circumstances to have abused her power. Yet in all the testimony by fifty witnesses in the battle for her fortune, in all her correspondence, there is not a single indication that Huguette ever used her wealth to hurt anyone. That just wasn’t her way.
    Huguette had experienced the finest belongings and most luxurious travel. She had seen heart-stopping panoramas, owned great art, heard inspiring music. Yet in the end, she preferred to live in a hospital room,with her hollandaise and brioche and cashmere sweaters. Huguette had the courage—or Clark stubbornness—to be an artist at a time when that wasn’t an approved path for a woman, to break away from a marriage she didn’t want, to resist the manipulations of her hospital and her museum to get more of her money, to leave most of her estate to her friends and to a charity that honored her mother’s memory. According to common belief, “just throwing money away” may be a sign of mental illness, but Huguette enjoyed giving gifts to the people she knew.
    These were not acts of incompetence, but of self-expression and resilience. In her own way, she found what life may be, a life of integrity.
    Huguette was a quiet woman in a noisy time. She had all the possessions that anyone could want, but she set them aside—all except her brioche and cashmere sweaters.
TO LIVE HAPPILY

 
    O N M ARCH 2, 2005, just a month before she signed her last will and testament, Huguette was sitting up in her hospital bed when Dr. Singman stopped by for a visit. She had a treat for him.
    Huguette recited a poem. “Le Grillon” (The Cricket) was one of the old French fables from the book of morocco leather in her father’s library at the Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue, where ninety years earlier Andrée had read to Huguette. This fable was written in the late 1700s by Jean-Pierre Claris de Florian. It is also sometimes called “True Happiness.” Huguette knew it by heart.
    T HE C RICKET
    A poor little cricket
    Hidden in the flowery grass
,
    Observes a butterfly
    Fluttering in the meadow
.
    The winged insect shines with the liveliest colors:
    Azure, purple, and gold glitter on his wings;
    Young, handsome, foppish, he hastens from flower to flower
,
    Taking from the best ones
.
    Ah! says the cricket, how his lot and mine
    Are dissimilar! Lady Nature
    For him did everything, and for me nothing
.
    I have no talent, even less beauty;
    No one takes notice of me, they know me not here below;
    Might as well not exist
.
    As he was speaking, in the meadow
    Arrives a troop of children
.
    Immediately they are running
    After this butterfly, for which they all have a longing
.
    Hats, handkerchiefs, caps serve to catch him
.
    The insect in vain tries to escape
.
    He becomes soon their conquest
.
    One seizes him by the wing, another by the body;
    A third arrives, and takes him by the head
.
    It should not be so much effort
    To tear to pieces the poor creature
.
    Oh! Oh! says the cricket, I am no more sorry;
    It costs too dear to shine in this world
.
    How much I am going to love my deep retreat!
    To live happily, live hidden
.
    Huguette, at ninety-eight years old, recited the childhood fable, from memory, three times.
    In English.
    In Spanish.
    And, of course, in