Empty Mansions

dinner at the house and then, separated. This afternoon Daddy is going to take me to the Gardens to see his marvelous begonias.…
    I am ever so sorry to have made you unhappy yesterday for I was heartbroken to see you cry and send me away without one of your smiles and fond kisses which are worth to me more than a world. I hope you will forgive me. Whether you write to me or not or do not open my letters, I am going to write to you, every week or so and it may prove to you, or it may not, that I love you above anybody else on this earth and that though I am selfish, I’d die first, before anything could happen to you. Good-by, dearest little Mother, and please forgive me
.
    Your loving daughter,
    Andrée
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 GirlScouts. 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