Empty Mansions

let me know in advance so I will be in New York. With affection, Huguette
.
    She made plans to meet him a few weeks later, after his arrival at New York’s oldest private club:
    Thanks for your letter. So glad about the foot. Will call Union Club on 3rd or 4th of March. Bon voyage. Affectionately, Huguette
.
    She checked on him that August:
    Cher Bill, Wondering what you are doing today. We are having marvelous weather. How is it over there? Did you ever replace Snoopy, not in your heart but in your household? Bien affectueusement, Huguette
.
    And the following year, in 1965, she worried after he took a spill at age sixty:
    Dear Bill, am anxious to know how you are and if you have fully recovered from your fall. So do let me hear from you. With much love, Huguette.
    Bill’s wife, Constance, had died in 1951, and he retired in 1960 to the coastal resort town ofAntibes on the French Riviera. He owned a classic, antique-stuffed Mediterranean house, which he called La Sarrazine. His yard had a huge mirror at one end to make the estate look twice as large.
    Huguette wrote checks to Bill, $3,000 at a time, well into the 1970s.He died of consumption, or pulmonary tuberculosis, in December 1976 in Antibes, at age seventy-one. His ashes were buried beside his parents in North Elba Cemetery outside Lake Placid, New York, in a shady spot witha mossy headstone.
    Even until her death, eighty-three years after their brief marriage, Huguette still had in her apartment her Cartier gold wedding band with its thirty-two small diamonds, as well as her Tiffany wedding presents with the monogram “H.C.G.”
SPOOKY

 
    T HOUGH SHE NOW OWNED a country house in Connecticut, in addition to her apartments in New York and the California estate, Bellosguardo, Huguette’s staff was dwindling. As old employees died or retired, she didn’t hire new ones. She apparently wasn’t comfortable interviewing new people. After her mother died, and then her Aunt Pauline, who had also resided at 907 Fifth Avenue, Huguette was the only resident of the forty rooms there.
    One of her last full-time caretakers,Delia Healey, was an Irish immigrant six years older than Huguette. During the 1960s until the late 1970s, Delia’s main duties were threefold.
    She brought in fresh bananas every morning and made Huguette’s lunch, usually crackers with sardines from a can.
    She looked after Huguette’s collection of French dolls, carefully washing and ironing their clothes. She also ran out to buy new dolls as soon as they became available at FAO Schwarz.
    She managed the recording of TV shows for Huguette to watch, particularly cartoons, so that Huguette could study the individual frames of animation. (In the 1960s, Huguette kept a library of French films, stored on early reel-to-reel tape, which she studied frame by frame.) Huguette purchased a newfangled Sony video recorder for recording the shows and had it delivered to Delia’s apartment. Delia’s assignment at one point was not only to record but also to transcribe every word of every episode of
The Flintstones
.
    Delia’s grandchildren remember Huguette as kind and generous. In 1975, she sent them Home Pong, an early videogame. She also sent them a custom-made dollhouse from Germany, which had exquisite detail, including toilet seats that went up and down and human figures that matched each member of their family. They recalled being surprised, a few weeks later, when Huguette sent the dollhouse back to Germany for repairs, because she said the floors needed to be refinished.
    After seventy-nine-year-old Delia became too infirm to take the traininto the city from Larchmont, in Westchester County, Huguette sent a driver in a town car to pick her up every morning. Never at ease with strangers, Huguette was forestalling having to hire someone new. When Delia died in 1980, her family was surprised to learn that Huguette was not an older woman but was actually younger than she.
    With no more full-time staff, Huguette called on a circle of part-time helpers.Out in Yonkers, New York, several evenings a week in the 1980s, the phone would ring at the home of Huguette’s antiques dealer, Robert Samuels. His daughter, Ann Fabrizio, remembers Huguette’s small voice insisting that he come right away to fix some item in her mother’s apartment: an inlaid table that had cracked, a chair that needed to be reupholstered, new cases for the dolls. In twenty-five years of fixing and furnishing her apartments,