Empty Mansions

at Fifth Avenue
$4,306,121
$100,142
Apartments for employees
$605,211
$14,075
Doll purchases and castles
$954,277
$22,192
Insurance and storage
$149,746
$3,482
Federal and state income taxes
$1,959,851
$45,578
Federal gift taxes
$738,599
$17,177
New York State gift tax refund
-$274,910
-$6,393
Connecticut real estate taxes
$156,791
$3,646
Miscellaneous
$487,354
$11,334
Gift: Ninta Sandres medical care
$769,580
$17,897
Gift: Ninta Sandre’s apartment
$17,504
$407
Gifts: Hadassah Peri
$455,100
$10,584
Gifts: Beth Israel Medical Center
$285,000
$6,628
Gift: Trust for Museum Exhibitions
$110,892
$2,579
Gift: Corcoran Gallery of Art
$50,000
$1,163
Gift: Music association, Santa Barbara
$10,000
$233
Transfer to her personal checking account (mostly for more gifts)
$1,200,000
$27,907
Total
$14,167,346
$329,473
    Strasheim said Huguette was similarly unrealistic about her own situation. “Dr. Wright said her reaction to her mother’s passing was quite irrational, and he thinks that led to her being so much of a recluse. She never really dealt with it. Dr. Wright tried many times to tell her she needed to get out, she needed sunlight, vitamin D. She had a way of switching that off. She didn’t want to see the ugliness of things around her. She could divert the conversation in a million ways: ‘I’m very busy right now, it’s a busy time of year, but I will get back to you on that.’ She was a shy ten-year-old throughout her life.”
    Ninta Sandré died in March 2000. Huguette did not attend the funeral Mass. She sent Lyn Strasheim $50,000.
    Strasheim said she once visited Huguette unannounced at Doctors Hospital, but Hadassah shooed her away. Huguette “looked like a bag woman. In a teeny, tiny little room, all the shades drawn.”
“YOU’D BETTER SIT DOWN, MOTHER”

 
    Y OU DIDN ’ T HAVE TO BE a longtime friend or employee of Huguette’s to benefit from her generosity. In fact, you didn’t have to know her at all.
    A lawyer showed up at Gwendolyn Jenkins’s apartment, way out in Queens, bearing a mystery. It was 1982. The lawyer said he had a letter for her, but he wouldn’t let her open it unless she promised to keep a secret. “This lawyer told me not to tell no one. He made me swear.”
    Yes, she said, she went to church every Sunday and Bible study on Wednesdays. She wouldn’t tell. The lawyer handed over the letter that changed her life.
    Gwendolyn was a nurse’s aide, a fifty-seven-year-old immigrant from Jamaica, living in a working-class area off Jamaica Avenue. Early every morning, she had taken the Q2 bus and the F train into Lower Manhattan, to Greenwich Village, more than an hour and a half each way. Even in the snow, she had walked the last blocks to an apartment at 1 Fifth Avenue, an Art Deco building overlooking Washington Square Park. Her patient was Irving Gordon, a Madison Avenue stockbroker, who had recently died of cancer.
    And now this lawyer was at her door, with his black-rimmed owl eyeglasses and every hair in place, saying his name was Don Wallace, trying to explain that he didn’t know Gwendolyn, that he didn’t know Irving either, but he had a client whose investments Irving had handled. Word of this nurse’s aide and her dedication had gotten around.
    “I was telling my daughter that night,” Gwendolyn recalled in her Jamaican accent, “I couldn’t believe how this woman, an older woman she was, had written such a nice card, a proper note. She thanked me for taking care of poor Mr. Irving. And she included a ‘little gift,’ she said, a check for three hundred dollars! I couldn’t believe it. I was going to tell them all about it at Bible study. I’ve been blessed!
    “And my daughter, she said, ‘You’d better sit down, Mother, and letme read this letter over to you. This check is for
thirty thousand
dollars!’ ”
    The check was written out with a blue felt-tip pen in a distinctive handwriting, an artist’s script, with every lowercase letter formed slowly, precisely, the same height. Gwendolyn didn’t recognize the name. “Never met her. Never heard of her.”
    Gwendolyn used the check to move south, putting a down payment on a house outside Atlanta, her retirement home. No more Q2 bus to the F train in the snow.
    Thirty years later, when asked by a reporter who had a copy of the canceled check for $30,000, Gwendolyn reluctantly confirmed the story. Still, she was mindful of her vow, protective of her benefactor’s privacy.
    Gwendolyn Jenkins still has