Marie Therese — Toye in the family, mamish to her grandchildren — was the mother of Mireille and her seven siblings, the wife who matched Serge through every chapter of their joint Haitian and American lives. In Haiti she ran the household in Turgeau, the hillside neighborhood above Port-au-Prince, and taught sewing and cooking lessons on the side. When her daughter Sandra contracted polio, Toye travelled with her to Cuba for the rehabilitative treatment Haitian medicine could not provide — Cuban hospitals in the 1950s were among the best in the Caribbean for paralytic-polio recovery; Castro’s 1959 revolution would not come for years yet.
After the family’s 1968-or-so emigration she made a second career as a seamstress in New York. She sewed for Ann Lowe — the African-American couturier who had designed Jackie Bouvier’s 1953 wedding gown and the rest of the Bouvier family’s dresses, and one of the great unsung talents of mid-century American fashion — and later for the designer Norma Kamali. Toye had a fine pair of hands and a quiet professional name in fashion houses two of America’s most famous brides would have recognized.
Like Serge she was cremated rather than buried at her death. Her father was Leroy Chassaing; her mother Marguerite Valcin.
