Empty Mansions

(She was preparing to move down to her mother’s old apartment.) But what to do with another five thousand square feet, the size of a basketball court? Chris sorted her financial records, using the unused servants’ bedrooms for different years.
    In 12W, the living room, with its dark Jacobean wood walls and wood beam ceiling, was filled with rows of simple wooden bookcases with floor-to-ceiling shelves full of items from Japan. Each shelf was carefully labeled and numbered: musical instruments, kimonos, wigs, hair ornaments, traditional footwear, fans, silk costumes, butterflies, art books. A large painting of a geisha with a dragonfly hairpin was hidden behind a three-part Japanese screen with dragons and swans. A Japanese castle with a moat sat on a table by the Steinway grand piano.
    One bedroom, an artist’s studio, was crammed with easels, canvases, and frames. Paintings included those of a Japanese doll, a self-portrait of the blond artist in a string of pearls, a harlequin, a doll in wooden shoes, and several female nudes.
    In a sitting room, there was a filing cabinet full of childhood mementos next to another one with bank statements from the 1970s. Boxes on shelves were marked “personal correspondence.”
    Shelves in cedar closets were filled with hatboxes, satin bed jackets, and dozens of boxes of shoes, many variations on the same styles: pumps from the Bonwit Teller department store of the 1930s and 1940s, casual slippers with a felt lining from Daniel Green. The white, glass-front kitchen cabinets displayed silver and fine china from the 1920s, and there was an old black Garland six-burner stove. The coat closet was stuffed with pink women’s housecoats and white cashmere cardigan sweaters, still in the package, as though the owner were away for a weekend.
    • • •
    Being Huguette’s personal assistant really meant that Chris, with an undergraduate degree in history and literature from Fairfield University in Connecticut, found himself enrolled in the Huguette Marcelle Clark Graduate School of Japanese History.
    Huguette called each morning from the hospital room, telling Chris which items she needed him to bring over for the day’s project. He kept a diary to record every day’s assignment. He answered her calls on one of the vintage black phones with a rotary dial and labeled with old-style phone numbers: BUtterfield 8 1093 and BUtterfield 8 3453.
    One morning in 2003, when Huguette was ninety-seven, she rattled off to Chris six books on Japanese theater history, calling each one by title. She was deep into a two-month project on Kabuki, creating a mock-up of a theater to be sent to the elderly artist in Japan, who would make a tabletop theater to her specifications. Everything had to be perfectly to scale and historically accurate. Her instructions for Chris:
    Find all the ladies-in-waiting of medium size.
    Find all the emperors in casual attire.
    Find all the court ladies who are playing cards.
    Huguette sent Chris searching through hundreds of boxes of dolls and figurines, looking for a particular Japanese historical character. Just as Americans would know a figure of Abraham Lincoln immediately from his top hat and beard, Huguette would know the figures from the Tokugawa shogunate, specifically those from the 1770s.
    Chris also had to find figures for the audience members, then the right scenery to go with them. “I wasn’t an expert on Kabuki theater,” Chris said. “I tried my best.”
    When he thought he had it all just right, he would measure the scenery, pose the figures in scenes from twelve or fourteen different plays or stories she selected, photograph it all from every angle, often including a ruler to show the measurements, and take the hundreds of snapshots to Huguette at the hospital.
    “Chris,” she would say, “that has nothing to do with it.” That was her gentle rebuke, a polite way of saying he had it all wrong. He’d mixed upa shogun with a daimyo. He’d placed a major character at the back of the stage.
    Finally, when she approved a set of photos, he would bring the full setup to the hospital room, all the delicate scenery and rare figures, just one time, for her to hold them and arrange them for a few hours or a couple of days. “Then,” Chris recalled, “she would be in heaven there for a while.” To her doctors, Huguette appeared to be merely playing with dolls. “But that wasn’t it,” Chris said.
    He would finally ship a full set of designs