They knew her as the slender, straight-backed woman with an independent streak and a head for numbers. She told them she had immigrated from Hungary, and her colleagues at Merrill Lynch did not pry with more questions.

What most of them did not know was that their colleague, the quiet market analyst with the Italian name and the Hungarian accent, had been born a countess and grew up in a castle. They had no idea that Ilona DeVito, as they knew her, had had little formal education before arriving on Wall Street, or that she and her family had fled to New York with no more than few small suitcases to escape the Romanian Communist government.

The death of Ilona DeVito di Porriasa last week, at 73, went largely unnoticed beyond her family and friends. But if nothing else, her story, as recounted by surviving relatives, peels back the hard shell of the city, proving, perhaps, that even the most anonymous apartment dweller can be a countess in exile.

Born in 1939 in a Transylvanian Baroque-style castle given to her parents as a wedding present by her grandmother, Countess Ilona Teleki de Szek spent the first years of her life surrounded by nannies, maids and cooks. Her mother was a baroness, her father a count who served as Transylvania’s representative to Hungary; one of his cousins, Pal Teleki served as prime minister of Hungary on two occasions and was said to have been responsible for the passage of a number of anti-Semitic measures.