Empty Mansions

Awani, or something like that, is also still there.
    Huguette: That’s the one where we went in 1915! The Moana Hotel. Is it still there, too?
    Paul: Yes, in fact Leslie [my daughter] said she was there just recently.…
    Huguette: Did you ever see the rainbow shower blossoms? They’re beautiful! They’re called Rainbow Shower.
    Paul: It’s a blossom? On a tree, you mean?
    Huguette: Yes.
    Paul: I don’t think so. How did your father enjoy Hawaii? Did he like it over there?
    Huguette: He enjoyed it. He used to go in the water. He went swimming there.
    Paul: With all his high-finance and business activity, was he able to have some fun, too?
    Huguette: Oh yes. We used to surfboard ride with Kahanamoku, you know. The Hawaiians, they used to take us out on the surfboard. Duke Kahanamoku, he was the champion swimmer at the time.… Because, you see, they used to have sharks around there. And if you go with them, you’d be more safe. Sometimes the sharks would come through the coral reef.
    And then, as she often did, she ended the call abruptly but cheerfully.
    Huguette: Well, nice talking with you, Paul. I won’t keep you.… And I’ll talk to you soon again. I’ll get you on the phone. Bye-bye.
    W.A.’s wife and children showed him great affection as well. A relative recalled Anna snuggling up to the old man and tugging on his whiskers playfully, with frolicsome affection.
    As W.A. passed his eightieth birthday, his weight began to fall, from his usual 125 to about 108. He continued to walkup to five miles a day, and he continuedsmoking his cigars. He remained devoted to his business correspondence on “the Clark interests,” approving expenditures on political committees, deflecting requests to give to colleges and convents.But he was growing weaker, and in 1922 he signed his last will and testament.
    That year, W.A. traveled to France with Anna and Huguette. They had been forced to wait four years after the end of the Great War until the mines were cleared from the French coast. Forever a friend of France, W.A.laid roses at the new Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe. In the photograph from that day, he looks noticeably weaker. This would be his last trip to France.
    By 1925, W.A. was no longer going to his office at 20 Exchange Street, off Wall Street, instead having his mail brought to him at home. “Becoming vaguer all the time,” he seemed “not to grasp matters regularly,” his son Will wrote in January of that year. W.A., who shunned automobiles after a couple of bad accidents, also had hurt his leg severely in a fall while running to catch a bus.
    Then a cold turned worse, and he was dead within a few days. He died on March 2, 1925, at age eighty-six, attended by Dr. William Gordon Lyle, the same doctor who had tried to save Andrée. Anna, Huguette, and most of the children from his first marriage were by his side.
    “Ex-Senator Clark, Pioneer in Copper, Dies of Pneumonia,” read the front-page headline in
The New York Times
. The headline continued, “His Career Picturesque. Went to Montana with Ox Team and Acquired One of Biggest Fortunes in America.”
    W.A.’s last will and testament called for a “decent and Christian burial in accordance with my condition in life, without undue pomp or ceremony.”More than three hundred people gathered for a service at the Clark mansion, in the main art gallery on the second floor, under his beloved Corot landscapes. “Thanatopsis” was read aloud, as it had been at Andrée’s funeral, and the thirty boy choristers from St. Thomas Church again sang as the organist played an old Scottish hymn: “Swift to its close, ebbs out life’s little day./Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away./Change and decay in all around I see./Oh, Thou who changest not, abide with me!”
    Among the more than four hundred floral tributes were orchids and lilies of the valley sent by President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican.
    Anna and Huguette joined the cortège, which also included W.A.’s children and grandchildren from his first marriage, accompanying hiscoffin north to the mausoleum he’d had built on the hilltop at a prominent intersection of Woodlawn Cemetery. His new neighbors were Pulitzer, Macy, Gould, and Woolworth.
    Andrew Carnegie’s theory was that life should be divided into three stages: education, making money, and giving all the money away. Little towns all across America still have Carnegie libraries. In a similar vein,