Empty Mansions (17 page)

In hard-rock mining, the men had the most dangerous occupation in America. Deep in Clark’s Belmont mine, workers wore long underwear and bib overalls to protect themselves from the 135-degree heat. Men rigging sticks of powder dynamite were warned to “
tap ’er light,” but it wasn’t unusual for a finger to be found still sporting a wedding ring. Diggers were crushed by falling timbers. Motormen and swampers were suffocated when trapped by underground fires. Rail benders stood in acidic water so strong it would eat anything metal. Because drilling produced black dust, the drills were called widow makers. “We were,” as one old miner named Tom Holter put it, “damn close to hell.”

In August 1917, the same summer that the Clark girls took a sojourn in Butte, a union organizer named Frank Little was working for the Wobblies, the Industrial Workers of the World, speaking out against U.S. entry into World War I. Relations between the union workers and the mine owners were complicated. In 1892, men at W.A.’s Original mine gave him
a walking stick with an engraved silver top as a sign of their affection. Yet the mine yards were surrounded by ten-foot electrified fences in case of union trouble.

Early on the morning of August 1, 1917,
Frank Little was found hanged from a railroad trestle in Butte. On his chest was a note with the words “First and last warning” and the numbers 3-7-77, an obscure code used by the Montana Vigilantes. With copper prices and demand at record levels, the war was going to make a lot of money for Butte, its workers, and its mine owners.

• • •

The following year, the girls’ vacation in Montana ended in tears. The parting had gone badly, with a quarrel between Anna and sixteen-year-old Andrée, who wrote her mother this letter:

WHAT LIFE MAY BE
 

T
HE
C
LARK SISTERS SHARED
a bedroom in the Clark mansion until Andrée was fourteen and Huguette ten. Decades later, Huguette told her night nurse about the bedtime routine of the young sisters. “Her sister was a wonderful writer and reader,” said the nurse, Geraldine Lehane Coffey, “and she would tell her stories at night. And she would not finish them.”

So, each night, Huguette would ask, “Will you continue tomorrow night?” And Andrée always would.

At age sixteen, Andrée had grown moody and tempestuous, which is to say she was a teenager. She also had a physical ailment, a bad back, and was taking exercises at home with a gym teacher, Alma Guy, who saw that the older daughter needed more than physical therapy. Andrée needed to have some time out of the smothering atmosphere of the Clark home.

Andrée was “
shy and timid and afraid to call her soul her own,” Miss Guy recalled. “Her parents were so occupied with other things that they really did not know what was happening to their daughter in the hands of maids and governesses. Andrée was never allowed to do anything for herself.”

Miss Guy pressed for Andrée to be allowed to join some activity outside the home, an outlet for self-expression. She suggested the Girl Scouts, a group that had formed in 1912 and was flourishing during World War I. At first Anna wasn’t sure this was a proper activity, saying that it sounded “
too democratic for the daughter of a senator,” but finally she relented.

And so in the winter of 1918–19, after the armistice was signed, Andrée joined Sun Flower Troop, which drew its recruits from the wealthy homes of Manhattan. She exchanged her au courant French fashions for the dark blue middy blouse and skirt, light blue sateen cotton neckerchief, blue felt campaign hat, and black shoes and stockings of the Girl
Scouts. Each Tuesday afternoon, Girl Scout day, she worked toward her Tenderfoot pin, then her Second Class patch, struggling to make an American flag with all forty-eight stars. “
I have made everything of the flag except the stars!” she wrote to a friend. “They are hopeless!!!” She learned Red Cross work, such as wrapping bandages and treating wounds, and built an open-air fire in the woods. She also volunteered with the Scouts at the Lighthouse, a recreational program of the New York Association for the Blind, where Miss Guy was the activities director.

“
Scouting really made a different girl of Andrée,” Miss Guy recalled. “She was quite determined to come down to the Lighthouse and start a troop for the blind girls there, she loved it so.”

Andrée had other adventures with her Girl Scout friends, far from the overbearing reach of governesses. At age sixteen, in a letter to a friend, she described riding with a group of girls through a suburban town in a Scout leader’s yellow jalopy, nicknamed the Yellow Peril, “a topsy-turvy, yellow flivver and we had our bloomers on, and were packed up in sweaters and coats, like sausages!!!! And the whole family of dogs was with us! Can you imagine us, bumping up and down on the crowded Main Street!!!!”

• • •

The summer before Andrée’s seventeenth birthday, in July and August 1919, she and Huguette took an outdoors trip with their mother, traveling north to a fishing club in Quebec, not far from the hometowns of Anna’s parents, and then to a resort area in the Maine woods near the Canadian border. Hotels and primitive camps lined Maine’s Rangeley Lakes, below Saddleback Mountain, a few years before the area became well known to hikers on the new Appalachian Trail.

On the trip, Andrée fell ill, first with a simple fever, which quickly grew worse and was accompanied by a severe headache. Anna and the girls were two days’ travel from home, far from the quarantine suite in the tower at 962 Fifth Avenue. Their father’s personal physician, William Gordon Lyle, rushed up from New York to assist the local doctor. For four days, Andrée lay ill at a house on Rangeley Plantation, on the south side of the lake, with Anna and Huguette by her side.

The doctor found that Andrée’s ailment was “
probably tubercular
meningitis,” a devastating inflammation of the membranes covering the brain and spinal cord. It would be twenty-five years before penicillin would be reported as effective in treating meningitis. On August 7, 1919, Louise Amelia Andrée Clark, the firstborn child of Anna and W.A. and the older sister of Huguette, died a week before her seventeenth birthday. W.A., who had been in Butte on business, was speeding eastward on the Empire State Express when he received a cable with the news.

The funeral service “
was most beautiful,” W.A. wrote to a friend. “We had the entire boy choir of the church,” W.A. wrote. “We laid the precious body away in the mausoleum in Woodlawn Cemetery.”

The Episcopalian rector from St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue read W.A.’s favorite poem, “Thanatopsis,” a young man’s meditation on death, from Andrée’s poetry book. The poet, William Cullen Bryant, argues that death should not be feared, for there is great company in it.

W.A. wrote to his brother Ross, “Mrs. Clark is very sad, but very brave.” And to a business associate he wrote, “
Mrs. Clark has wonderful fortitude, and little Huguette is also very courageous.”

• • •

After the funeral, W.A. and Anna discovered Andrée’s diary, which revealed that their older daughter had had an unhappy childhood, more desperately unhappy than they had suspected. She’d had great difficulty making the transition from France to America. Her father told a friend how devastated he was by reading it.

The diary brightened, however, when Andrée wrote about her Tuesday Girl Scout meetings. She told of the camaraderie of hiking with the girls and of the uplifting effect of being allowed to do a task however she decided was best. She included a folded manuscript of a story she had written, “The Four Little Flowers,” with characters from Sun Flower Troop.

“
Scouting has been a hand in the dark to me,” she wrote. “It has changed me from a moody, thoughtless girl, and has shown me what life may be.”

Her family sought solace in making a contribution to the Girl Scouts. The Clarks knew an area around Scarsdale, north of the city, where they often spent weekends with W.A.’s daughter Katherine in her twenty-one-room manor house. Looking for a proper memorial, Anna and W.A. helped scour the countryside for just the right spot. In 1919, they donated 135 acres in the village of Briarcliff Manor, where primitive land with a brook and a small lake became the first national Girl Scout camp, called
Camp Andrée Clark.

Thirteen-year-old
Huguette stood grimly at her father’s side as he handed over the deed to the camp at a Scout office in the city. While sixteen uniformed Girl Scouts sat or kneeled on the floor, Huguette stood. Not a Scout herself, she was dressed in city clothes, with her long blond hair flowing down her back toward the fur cuffs of her coat. During the ceremony, she held her emotions in check, resting her hand reassuringly on her eighty-year-old father’s shoulder.

For the rest of Huguette’s life, members of her family would speculate about the great emotional trauma she must have felt at her sister’s death. She had lost her only sibling, her playmate, an older sister with whom she had spent her entire life. In later years, at her bedside on Fifth Avenue, she kept a photograph of her sister in a small, oval Cartier frame. She also kept Andrée’s letter to their mother from the year before she died, and a lock of Andrée’s hair.

Camp Andrée, as the girls called it, became a progressive camp, democratic in spirit, with the girls directing many of their own activities. Each group of girls had its own rustic quarters; there was no dining hall, no dormitory, though Anna made certain that the camp had a small hospital and a nurse. Still in existence today, the camp has trained thousands
of Scout leaders and given generations of girls a summer experience of close community in the wilderness.

For years after Andrée’s death, Girl Scouts wrote letters to Anna, thanking her for making it possible for them, too, to see what life may be.

CULTIVATE IMAGINATION