Empty Mansions

also surrounded by dolls on the porch of her father’s first mansion, in Butte, where she remembered the pansies on the stoop. Anna smiling as she sat on a park bench during a summer sojourn in Greenwich, Connecticut. Huguette’s Aunt Amelia, her mother’s sister, standing on the grand marble staircase at the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. The rooms and gardens at Bellosguardo. Anna and W.A. on the beach at Trouville, laughing. Little Huguette in her Indian costume and headdress, hugging her father.
    She would talk, Hadassah said, mostly about “her dear father, her dear mother, her dear sister, Aunt Amelia.” Huguette liked to tell the nurses about the summers at the beach in Trouville, how her father built the beautiful Columbia Gardens so the people of Butte could have something to enjoy, how Duke Kahanamoku carried her on his shoulders on a surfboard. And she would share somberly how her sister had died on the trip to Maine. “She talked dearly about that,” Hadassah said. “Talked all the time about her sister and parents. Yes, that affected her very much.”
    Huguette’s eyesight had declined, but she was able to read with eyeglasses and then a magnifying glass until past age one hundred. Herhearing was poor in the right ear, but she could hear well out of her left if one talked right at it, and she refused a hearing aid. She didn’t deny that her hearing was poor, but she didn’t want anything put into her ears, nothing like her mother’s primitive squawk box. Hadassah bought a telephone with big numbers and adjustable volume, but Huguette refused to use it, saying she could hear fine with the regular phone.
    Doctors and nurses described Huguette as a woman who knew her own mind. “She was remarkably clear,” said Karen Gottlieb, a floor nurse who brought her warm milk at bedtime. “Clear in her wants, and things she didn’t want. Yes meant yes, and no meant no.” Gottlieb said that she never saw any family try to visit, that Huguette’s real family seemed to be Hadassah.
    The regular hospital staff rarely saw Huguette. One exception was in 2000, when Hadassah herself was in the hospital for back surgery. Huguette arranged for Hadassah to be in a room just down the hall, two or three doors away. Huguette then went to visit Hadassah, dressing up in street clothes and walking down the hall. She wore her favorite Daniel Green shoes.
    “That’s one day everybody in the floor almost dropped dead,” Hadassah said. “They saw Madame coming out of the door with heel shoes.”
    • • •
    Hadassah described Huguette as “a beautiful lady. Very loving. Very respectful. Love people. Very refined lady. Very cultured. Good heart—good soul and good heart. Never hurt anybody. Very, very generous, Madame.”
    Dr. Singman said he saw that Hadassah and Huguette were very close. “Hadassah was very good to her and was a good nurse for her and worked hard with her.”
    Huguette’s first question in the morning would be “When is Hadassah coming?” She would call nearly every night to make sure Hadassah got home safely and to be reassured that Hadassah would be coming in the next day. Sometimes she’d call just as Hadassah got home, and the answering machine would pick up first. Here is a recording from about 2007, when Huguette was 101. We hear Huguette’s sweet, high-pitchedFrench, and Hadassah’s Filipino accent, shouting to make sure she is heard.
    H ADASSAH: Madame, I love you.
    H UGUETTE: I love you, too. Good night to you.
    H ADASSAH: Have a good night.
    H UGUETTE: Have a good night.
    H ADASSAH: Thank you, Madame.
    H UGUETTE: Will I see you tomorrow?
    H ADASSAH: Yes, Madame.
    H UGUETTE: Thank you.
    H ADASSAH: I love you.
    H UGUETTE: I love you, too.
    H ADASSAH: Good night.
    H UGUETTE: Good night, Hadassah.
A REASONABLE PRICE

 
    H UGUETTE KEPT HER LOCATION SECRET for nearly twenty years, never telling any relative or anyone outside her inner circle that she was in the hospital. All of her outgoing correspondence showed 907 Fifth Avenue as her return address.
    Though she was no longer living in Apartment 8W, Huguette set to work remodeling it—not to modernize it, but to furnish it so it looked more like her old apartment, 12W. Her main focus was on making her bedroom identical to her mother’s old bedroon from the 1920s, which remained undisturbed in the apartment upstairs.
    For fifty dollars in tips, she could easily have gotten the doormen to carry the bedroom furniture from the