Empty Mansions

children.”
    Ann remembers that while they were at Bellosguardo, the Paganini Quartet played a concert just for them. “It was idyllic.”
    Both goddaughters said that the subject of Anna’s elder daughternever came up. The girls knew that something bad had happened, so bad that it was never spoken of. Ann recalled the thatched-roof Andrée’s cottage as “a shrine—we had to be very quiet around that.”
    • • •
    The second memorial to Andrée was provided by Huguette. In August 1928, before her wedding here,Huguette honored her sister by giving $50,000 to the City of Santa Barbara to create the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge on city land just behind Bellosguardo. Her donation eventually turned the marshy inlet from a foul-smelling eyesore into a lake with three man-made islands. The city had drawn up plans for the refuge at Anna’s request, and Huguette came up with the donation from her own money. This donation benefited the Clarks, too, removing a blight from the neighborhood, but the thirty-one-acre refuge was primarily Huguette’s memorial to her sister, just as Camp Andrée was her parents’.
    For more than eighty years, the Andrée Clark Bird Refuge has been a serene lagoon and garden for wild ducks, snow geese, and other waterfowl heading south for the winter, as well as a year-round home for herons, cormorants, and other water birds. It is also a sanctuary for people, but on Huguette’s terms. Her donation included strict limits on its use: no camping, no boating, no swimming, no concessions, and no parking alongside the boulevard. And it must forever be named for Andrée.
    After the lake filled up with algae, in 1989 Huguette donated an additional $30,000 for its cleanup and for educational programs. Still in some years a foul odor comes off the water from decomposing algae, and in 2012 the cost of needed rehabilitation was estimated at $1 million. The lake, like a life well lived, needs constant replenishment with fresh oxygen.
PRIVATE SPACES

 
    T HE DAUGHTER of the estate manager, Barbara Hoelscher Doran, recalls playing dolls with Huguette in the early 1950s at Bellosguardo. Little Barbee, as she was called, said she didn’t think for a moment about the difference in ages. Barbee Hoelscher was born in 1944 and was still a child in the early 1950s, while Huguette was in her forties. “Huguette would phone our house and invite me over for afternoon tea. I would walk over with the dogs and sit with Huguette and Anna on the terrace under the big umbrellas, overlooking the great lawns and ocean. I remember having lemonade, tea, and lovely cakes and cookies made by the French chef who came with the ladies from New York.”
    Usually the Clark estate had no Clarks, only servants. There was work to be done, of course. Anna’s English butler, the tall and quite proper Thomas Morton, was responsible for the dining room, with its hundreds of dark wood panels. This is one of three rooms in the house salvaged from the old Clark mansion on Fifth Avenue. (Anna, who of course didn’t inherit the house, did not save these rooms, but had to buy them back from an antiques dealer.) The ceiling is a wonder, made of canvas, trimmed in gold, and painted with comical human figures and colorful cherubs. There were maids to supervise, but no work of urgency. Morton found time to become expert at cultivating bonsai.
    Into the 1960s, Bellosguardo operated on the forty-eight-hour rule. The staff was expected to have the house ready for the family within two days’ notice of a Clark visit. Sometimes, Barbara recalls, Anna and Huguette “would arrive on such short notice that Mother offered to help whip off the dust sheets covering the furniture and brighten the rooms with flower arrangements.”
    Then the house would spring to life. Anna would show off to visitors her harps and her collection of ladies’ fans from the courts of France. Huguette had her own enthusiasms: photography and painting.Her photo albums show that she roamed the grounds freely with her camera, capturing the symmetrical steps by the reflecting pool and a still life offruit leaves in a bowl. She documented every room repeatedly. Years later, she would astonish the staff by calling to request a certain book on Japanese culture, telling them which shelf it was on, and that it was the seventh book over from the right.
    Her artist’s studio was tucked into the back for maximum privacy. There she kept not only paintings but the Japanese dolls