Empty Mansions

the green tile floor lies a white sheet of paper. This typeset sign bears the signature of one of the housemen and has been in place for more than a decade now. It marks the former location of a piece of furniture.
    O N 29 N OVEMBER 2001,
    I MOVED A WHITE ,
    WOODEN STEP STOOL FROM
    THIS ROOM TO THE M AIN
    W ING ELEVATOR AS AN AID
    TO RESCUE IN CASE THE
    ELEVATOR GETS STUCK .
    Harris
                                       
    Out in the massive garage, formerly a carriage barn and staff dormitory with a ballroom for dances, the automobile shop was once the domain of Walter Armstrong, the Scottish chauffeur for the Clarks. With no Clarks to drive most of the time,Armstrong filled the quiet afternoons at Bellosguardo with the low drone and high melody of his bagpipes.
    Armstrong is long gone. After he retired,Huguette paid him his full salary as a pension until he died in the 1970s. Then Huguette paid the pension to his widow, Alma, until she died in the 1990s. Buttwo of the automobiles that Armstrong lovingly cared for are still here, carefully preserved. Huguette turned down repeated offers to buy them.
    On the right is a 1933 Chrysler Royal Eight convertible, its top perpetually down, with black paint and cream wheels. The chrome hood mascot of a leaping impala soars over a massive front grille. Huguette recalled Armstrong letting her drive the convertible on the coast road in the Santa Barbara summers of the Great Depression.
    On the left is an enormous black 1933 Cadillac V-16 seven-passenger limousine. Its golden goddess hood ornament gleams under the garage’s chandelier. Spare tires are affixed at the front of the running boards. Pull-down shades, like those in a drawing room, are ready to provide privacy to occupants of the coach.
    On both automobiles, the yellow-and-black California license plates say 1949.

THE MOST REMARKABLE DWELLING

 
    H UGUETTE AND A NDRÉE , daughters of the multimillionaire former senator W. A. Clark,arrived in New York Harbor in July 1910, immigrants to their own country. They had sailed from Cherbourg, France, in first-class cabins on the White Star liner
Teutonic
. Wearing broad-brimmed sun hats, the Clark girls posed for newspaper photographers on the pier. Andrée, the adventurous eight-year-old brunette, looked confidently at the cameras, as her tag-along sister, blond four-year-old Huguette, looked down uncertainly.
    Huguette’s first day in America was filled with conjecture and misinformation. Reporters wrote that the heiresses didn’t speak a word of English. Yet their parents were born in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and the girls held American passports, citizens since birth. In fact, they were being well educated by private tutors and governesses, with lessons in three languages: English, Spanish, and French.
    Huguette Marcelle Clark wasborn in Paris on June 9, 1906. Her parents’ apartment was on avenue Victor Hugo, at No. 56, a short walk down the wide, tree-lined avenue from the Arc de Triomphe. The baby girl, like the avenue, was named forFrance’s beloved novelist, poet, and dramatist, who had lived just down the block in his last days. The child’s name may also have been a nod to her father’s French Huguenot ancestry. As a young woman, Huguette sometimes signed her name Hugo, and some of her friends called her Hugs. Andrée was nearly four when Huguette was born. When she had been told that a baby sister was due, Andrée said to her mother, “Let me think it over.” Even one hundred years later, Huguette loved to laugh at her sister’s cleverness. Huguette’s father was old enough to be her great-grandfather. When Huguette was born, W.A. was a vigorous sixty-seven with four grown children from his first marriage, while Huguette’s mother, Anna LaChapelle Clark, was only twenty-eight.
    Although both parents had accompanied the girls on the ocean crossing, W.A. is the proud parent in the photographs on the pier. Annastayed off to the side out of the camera’s view. In the rare public photos of her, Anna appears standoffish, coolly looking out from under her tilted formal hats. But in the private photos in Huguette’s albums, we see another Anna. Wearing her fashionable Continental dresses with a sash around her waist, she smiles warmly, playfully.
    When the family arrived in 1910, they had no house in New York to go to. The greatest mansion in the city wasn’t quite ready, even after ten years of construction. W.A.