Empty Mansions

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 tubercularmeningitis,” 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.
    Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
    Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
    Couch more magnificent
.
    Thou shalt lie down
    With patriarchs of the infant world, with kings
,
    The powerful of the earth, the wise, the good
,
    Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past
,
    All in one mighty sepulcher
.
    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, calledCamp Andrée Clark.
    Thirteen-year-oldHuguette 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