Empty Mansions

needed Huguette’s consent. There was an additional need to add to the small endowment her father had left for the cemetery, and she agreed to put up the full $147,000. When the renovation was finished, the family held a picnic at the cemetery, on the grass beside the granite memorial to the senator. Of course, Huguette did not attend.
    This effort brought to Bock’s attention the fact thatHuguette had no place to be buried. He’d never checked on this before. The cemetery staff suggested that her body could be cremated, but Huguette was upset by this idea, insisting that she be with her mother and father and sister. The cemetery proposed that she be buried in the ground near the mausoleum. No, she said, inside!
    Any changes at the mausoleum required by law the approval of every living descendant of W. A. Clark. With urgency now, Bock rounded up their signatures from around the world, learning for the first time the names and whereabouts of all her living relatives. With approvals in hand, engineers found a solution in 2010: A new crypt could be built inside the mausoleum.
    At age 103, Huguette finally had a place to be buried.
    • • •

    Huguette was laid to rest in the Clark mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, along with her father, mother, sister, and relatives from her father’s first marriage. Though every spot was filled by 1963, Huguette waited until she was nearly one hundred to have a place carved out for her under her mother’s tomb
. ( illustration credit12.1 )
    Huguette had for decades, at least since 1989,refused to sign a living will or a do-not-resuscitate order, anything that would limit lifesaving efforts in an emergency. “She wanted to live as long as she possibly could,” explained Geraldine, the night nurse. Huguette had named a medical proxy to speak for her with the hospital: her accountant, Irving Kamsler, who visited her every two to three weeks.
    In late 2010, Huguette became more frail. When doctors found that she could no longer make her own decisions, Kamsler told them to follow her previously expressed wishes, to continue all lifesaving treatment.
    In the spring of 2011, Kamsler got the call. Huguette had suffered heart failure, and was moved to intensive care.
    So Huguette spent her last weeks as so many do, being fed through a tube, enduring IVs and scans and scopes.
    Chris Sattler said she was able to speak the last time he saw her. “I said, ‘I thank you for everything.’ She says, ‘No, Chris, I thank you.’ ”
    She died early on the morning of May 24, 2011, two weeks short of her 105th birthday. Hadassah was by her side at the end. Huguette had long said she wanted no funeral, no priests, but in her final hours in the middle of the night, Hadassah, a Roman Catholic convert to Orthodox Judaism, called for a priest, who gave Huguette the last rites.
    After a life lived in the shadows, the news stories had shoved Huguette back into the limelight. Her obituary appeared on the front page of
The New York Times
, just like her father’s.
    Her occupation, as listed on her death certificate, was “artist.”
    • • •
    The Clark relatives pressed Bock to let them know about a funeral Mass or when she would be buried, but the attorney said her wishes were to have no ceremony.
    Huguette’s casket was carried up the steps of the Clark mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery and through the open bronze doors, joining her dear father, mother, and sister. The casket was placed on a shelf built under her mother’s crypt. The two share a single tomb marker.The entombment was arranged before the cemetery’s gates were opened for the day, to keep out relatives and cameras. The only attendants worked for the funeral home and the cemetery. This time no one read “Thanatopsis,” including the passage “What if thou withdraw in silence from the living, and no friend take note of thy departure?”
    A few weeks later, in California, at a Roman Catholic church near Bellosguardo, old friends and relatives gathered for a simple memorial service. Inside the gates at Bellosguardo, the work went on, gardeners and housemen preparing the Clark estate for another summer.

JUSTICE

 
    N INETEEN OF H UGUETTE ’ S CLOSEST RELATIVES , her Clark relatives, went to court in 2012 to throw out her last will and testament. If the will were overturned, they would inherit her entire fortune, more than $300 million.
    The nineteen relatives were W.A.’s great-grandchildren and