Empty Mansions

right, next to one of the men, is Huguette, wearing a party dress and a strand of pearls, her eyes fixed on something in the distance. In her lap, she holds a doll with well-coiffed coal-black hair, wearing its own party dress.
    Family members began to say Huguette was “slow” or “emotionally immature.” Her father was too old when she was conceived, they’d say, or she must have been damaged by her sister’s death or her brief marriage. The children in the family heard these stories and accepted them as fact, having little other information to go on. They knew nothing of her life, of her painting. Some in the next generation didn’t even know that Huguette ever had a sister.
    Huguette was well aware of her relatives.She knew the names of the children and grandchildren. When she saw photos, she expressed concern when a relative seemed to appear in failing health.
    After the death, in 2002, of her half-niece Agnes Clark Albert, who had gone to Miss Spence’s with her, Huguette sent a handwritten card to Agnes’s son.
    Dear Paul. Your kind letter regarding your dear mother deeply touched me. Your mother was a very remarkable person and had such great talent as a musician. I admired her greatly and was very fond of her. You had reason to be very proud of her. With my very deepest sympathy, Dear Paul, and much love. Tante Huguette
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    Small acts of generosity were observed but didn’t change the family narrative. Another of Charlie’s grandchildren, Jacqueline Baeyens-Clerté, was about ten when she met Huguette at an afternoon tea at Bellosguardo in 1952. Huguette and Anna were excited to be spending time with these relatives living in France. “Aunt Huguette was very shy,” Jacqueline recalled, “and her mother did all the talking.” Without prompting, however, Huguette gave Jacqueline and her cousin tiny cameras as welcoming gifts.
    For the most part, however, Huguette kept her distance through the decades.She sent flowers to a list of friends every New Year—azaleas ortriple amaryllises—but there were no relatives on the list. She called a few relatives at Christmas and Easter. And when relatives called occasionally to invite her out, she would beg off with an excuse that became a running joke in the family. Each time she would say in French, “
Je suis enrhumée”
—“I have a little cold.”
    • • •
    The most detailed family memory of a visit to 907 Fifth Avenue was told by Huguette’s niece Agnes, and is relayed by her daughter Karine. It’s a story of a valuable painting and of rare musical instruments, and it reveals something of the family dynamic between Huguette and her mother. In one afternoon shopping trip, Anna made it easier for her daughter to spend more time with her, and she founded one of the noted chamber music groups of the twentieth century.
    Anna was mad about chamber music, quite an unusual avocation for someone with only an eighth-grade education. She sang choral music with her low contralto voice as a member of the Oratorio Society of New York. She was a dedicated student of the harp,taking afternoon lessons at her Fifth Avenue apartment, precisely at four o’clock, fromMarcel Grandjany, a Frenchman who taught at the Juilliard School in New York. Grandjany was an influential composer and teacher on a difficult and little understood instrument and may be the third-best-known harpist of all time, after King David and Harpo Marx. He dedicated many works to his patron, Anna, and later to her daughter Huguette, including a suite based on “La Belle au Bois Dormant,” or “Sleeping Beauty.”
    For years, nothing prevented Anna from going out to hear chamber music—not for the society, not to be seen, but for Haydn and Brahms and Debussy. On one occasion, a musician recalled, she attended a three P.M . matinee at the Town Hall in New York, stayed in her seat awaiting the five-thirty twilight concert, and was back for the evening recital at eight-thirty.
    But as Anna moved into her sixties, her hearing grew dismal. She used the latest newfangled hearing aid, an electronic box that she held out to pick up sound, with a wire attached to her ear. Anna began to take her music only at home, inviting musicians to play at 907 Fifth Avenue.Huguette sometimes came downstairs to her mother’s apartment for the music, but rarely for the conversation.
    One of the musicians who encountered Huguette on these musical afternoons was violinist Henri Temianka, who offered a memory