Heir Conditioning at Open Country shares an autobiography that is a true, Camelot-like tale-a dramatic story of inheritance featuring a Mordred, a Morgan le Fay, and later, thankfully, a Sir Galahad who saved the day in the final hour. Russell Hunter and two of his cousins were left the contents of a twenty-nine-room mansion that had been closed up for twenty years. It had belonged to his cousin Margy's very wealthy family. Hunter had known the estate as a child when the family was still wealthy and was both grieved and appalled to find out what had become of the home he once knew and loved. When he and his cousins opened the house, they discovered that the contents ran the gamut from pure trash to ancestral dresses, china, silver, glass, and furniture dating from the eighteenth century. As they worked their way through the contents, trying to determine how best to handle them, one of the heirs, in the style of Morgan le Fay, became very greedy about the value of the house's contents; she attempted to dominate the sale process so that she profited more than the others. The trio of cousins was saved by the Sir Galahad figure who managed the house sale-from which all of the heirs benefited equally.

Heir Conditioning at Open Country

By Russell Hunter

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2011 Russell Hunter
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-9105-7

Contents

Chapter 1 Camelot and Camelot Lost...................................................1Chapter 2 A Remarkable Woman, Your Cousin ...........................................5Chapter 3 Patton Crosses Rhine in a Daring Drive.....................................42Chapter 4 We Have Found about Eighty Dollars in Cash Hidden Away.....................59Chapter 5 That Nameless Thump........................................................90Chapter 6 This Is a Rare Experience We're Having.....................................126Chapter 7 You Do Have Enough Gas, Don't You?.........................................145Chapter 8 This Is Going to Be a Very Important Sale..................................160Chapter 9 I Guess I'll Just Have to Come Down a Nickel...............................191Chapter 10 It Was Not the Ruin ......................................................213

Chapter One

Camelot and Camelot Lost

Brilliant sunshine filtering through red and gold maple leaves that last day gave Open Country a cheerful air that it had not worn all summer. The driveway seemed to open up in the October sunlight, and even the ruins of the broad porches that hugged the house seemed less grim and forbidding.

My footsteps still echoed hollowly in the great central hall, but the room was bright with sunlight from the second-story clerestory windows in the gallery above, and the room even seemed to smell better because the musty odor that had plagued us all summer was gone. Some leftover trash from the sale the day before smoldered gently on the hearth, but, as I walked over to sweep a last remnant of embroidered linen into the embers, I noted that the place seemed tidy at last.

Strips of wallpaper might hang from the walls and bare laths show through the plaster, but Cousin Margaret's home was clean and ready for its new owner. Whereas she would have hated the idea of people invading her home for a public sale, at least she could have no quarrel with the way we left it.

Leaving the wide Dutch door open, I climbed the stairs for a final, solitary, personal farewell. As I turned on the landing to look out at the magnificent maples and the broad view that gave the house its name, the full weight of our summer's burden hit me like a thunderbolt, and I started to weep. While my footsteps echoed through the bare and empty rooms, the tears flowed achingly from some limitless source within me, and my final sight of the rooms was blurred with tears as my sobs echoed my farewell through the emptiness of the deserted house.

It was not the ruin of Open Country I was saying farewell to, but the warm and vibrant home I had known in my childhood. Here was the Green Room, where I heard my first music, a scratched recording of the Magic Fire music from Die Walküre played on a Victrola with an enormous wooden horn. Here—Cousin Margaret's bedroom where, after she was forced to retreat to the servants' wing, I found her bed neatly made and turned down, the pair of red-and-gold embroidered slippers as carefully laid out as they had been when I had toured the house before my parents had died years before, a sign that she had not quite given in.

Here also was the bedroom where, after the 1929 Crash, the two sisters had tried futilely to wrest from my dying Cousin Henry enough of the family money to keep Cousin Margaret comfortable in her old age, and where Cousin Catherine herself had died a year later. Here, too, was the spot on the porch where I used to sit and admire Cousin Margaret's garden over tea while I heard the family tales I loved retold and my genealogy analyzed. I smelled again the midsummer fragrance of spiced peaches cooking in the kitchen under Cousin Catherine's watchful eye, and the flower room was perfumed anew with the smell of new-cut English lavender.

There was more to it, however, than simple childhood memories and their loss. I was crying both for my own childhood and for the loss of something deeper, something rooted in the distant past, even before my birth. It was a farewell to a dream, a sense of security that had slipped from me without my knowledge. It was essentially my parents' world, a world that had lived for me through their eyes, their values, and the stories that they had told me as a child.

They gave me their dream—one of stability, of safety, of (for them) secure social position. Of social duty as well, but duty willingly assumed in return for that position. I had romanticized it, but this did not make the farewell any less poignant. I rather imagine that loss of a dream and loss of reality have much in common.

I had, during that summer, returned to that earlier time and to its values. While I had helped dig out relics of the past, sought to deal with them, and sometimes fought over them, I had revisited that time not as a child, but as an adult, and I sensed deeply the Camelot world I had lost.

That was the major source of my grief. I had long since wept out my grief for my parents, my cousins, and the others with whom I had inhabited that past. It was the past itself—my personal dream—for which I grieved. I feel a reflection of that sadness as I write this.

I had a lot to cry about, and it did me good to get it out of my system. Presently, I cried myself out. My tour of the house was finished and my farewell complete; I stepped out through the French doors in the living room into the sunlit ruin of the garden.

The acrid odor of boxwood struck my nostrils, the only tangible remnant of all that had been there. The rest was gone: an era gone, the stability of my childhood gone, loves and lives passed from existence into memory, the gardens turned into jungle, the furnishings escaped from the prison of dead storage into the warmth of other homes. Standing there, smelling the boxwood and looking at the syringa bushes, I thought again of the sweet smell of their June blossoms when I had first returned to Open Country weeks before.

This is more than the story of that summer at Open Country, it is an allegory, a tale of Camelot and Camelot lost. It is also about a woman who would not give up and about the never-ending conflict between both the essential decency and the greed that are in us all.

The Open Country world of my youth was Camelot, a dream world of plenty and of leisure. It was a world in which some people, the fortunate, had leisure, leisure to appreciate the little things of life that appear to have been lost since that time—the sweet songs of birds, the scent of honeysuckle, the perfection of a dewdrop. And yet there was greed within that world—greed, ambition, and burning anger—a Mordred who leveled the walls about my deaf cousin's shoulders and set the stage for her final problems. There was, unfortunately, no Galahad to save her.

The allegory of Camelot fits that summer at Open Country as well as it does the demise of Open Country itself. For some of us brought Camelot with us to the dismantling of that dead world. While we dug out the relics of the past in our archeological dig, we lived in our own world of essential decency and gentility and attracted to us those who were like-minded. As in Camelot itself, however, there was a Morgan le Fey, and there was, in addition, a succession of Mordreds. That they did not succeed in their designs was due to the appearance at the last minute of a Galahad, a man who had the experience and humanity that we needed, who possessed those gentle qualities that we shared, and who was willing to pull our irons from the fire at the last minute.

This is, then, the story of the dream of Camelot, the perfect city that lives in us all; it is also the story of the greed that occasionally takes over that city from within or from without. It is, above all, a story of human beings with their strengths and their weaknesses.

Chapter Two

A Remarkable Woman, Your Cousin ...

It had all begun four months earlier, with the arrival in my West Coast home of a telegram from Cousin Margaret's lawyer.

"Regret to inform you Margaret Leverich died Saturday. Funeral Tuesday at Greenwood Cemetery. Details to follow. John E. Quinn

I immediately felt a keen sense of loss. I had known my little cousin and her country home, Open Country, from the time I was a baby. This was the final loss of my childhood.

All of those who had known me in that childhood and my teen years—my grandparents, my parents, Cousin Margy's brother and sister—were gone. She was the last of them.

Though there had been an interruption in our relationship in previous years due to a family disagreement, I had reestablished contact with her a couple of years before; she had visited me on the West Coast two winters in a row and had thus become part of my present. Now she, too, was gone, definitively gone.

A few days later I received a letter from Mr. Quinn, giving me the details he had promised, details that included the fact that my cousin wanted me to share the contents of her home, Open Country, with two other cousins whom I had not seen for thirty years. Although I appreciated her generosity, I wondered how much there might be for Lloyd, Katherine, and myself to share and whether the Big House was even safe to enter after years of neglect.

A few weeks later, I received a letter from Lloyd Robertson. He and his wife had visited the house shortly after my cousin's death.

"Katherine (his sister), Louise (his wife), and I know Cousin Margaret sold almost everything of value some years ago. Our mother bought a quantity of table silver, some chairs, and a bed or two, etc. Yet, I dare say, there is quite a job before us.

"The whole place seemed in pitiful condition. I can't bring myself to give many details. It was devilish cold, cold enough to see one's breath in the house all day. The large house is musty. Much evidence of water leaks, tattered wallpaper, crumbled plaster all about. Really disturbing when I recall former times. Quite happily, I report the furnishings are in passable order for the most part.

"I don't wonder Cousin M. didn't want you to enter the house (referring to an earlier letter of mine); I am sure she wouldn't have let us in either if she were alive. How horrible to see one's house go down that way."

Later in the spring I received another letter: "We returned from a visit to the Big House several days ago. Tired, but relieved in the knowledge that we have "licked" the servants' wing. Little enough indeed, but a step in the right direction. When I write licked the servants' wing, I mean separated the chaff from the chaff.

"Apparently, Cousin M. used that wing as a catchall for all the general and sundry oddments in that part of Westchester County. Don't think me critical; it is merely a statement of fact. We found nothing of value, only old clothes, letters, papers, and toilet effects. Cousin M. also left a number of lists of things sold through antique dealers."

In May, after I had written that I would go east to help, he wrote again: "We'll all be glad to see you and have your help. There is still much to be done. Louise and I made our ninth trip to Open Country on Saturday. At last, we begin to see a little headway. A good deal of trash has been cleared away, but much more to come. Things are progressing more slowly than we all thought they would. With your arrival, we'll find more heart for the job."

I left for the East in June, expecting to be there for about two weeks. At a distance, it appeared that, indeed, nothing of real value remained at Open Country, that our main task would be to clear out the house, selling what little we could and throwing out the balance so that no purchaser of the property would be able to mock our cousin's pack rat habits. I felt that I owed it to my two cousins, Lloyd and Katherine, as well as to Cousin Margaret herself, to lend a hand in the task.

Some instinct made me want both to meet with Mr. Quinn privately and to pay an informal and very personal visit to the house before meeting my cousins. The first interview would give me a chance to learn some things from Mr. Quinn about my cousin that I had not known before, and a visit to the house alone would enable me to renew my acquaintanceship with the home in which I had first known my childhood playmate. I therefore fudged on the date of my arrival on the East Coast.

I arrived there in a driving northeaster and decided to postpone my visit to the house and to see Mr. Quinn first. I was staying with Tom and Dorli Bates, friends of mine from college, in nearby Wilton, and, rather than brave New York traffic in a driving rain, I elected to take the train. As the train rumbled through well-remembered towns, I began to think about my little cousin and about all the ways in which I had known her over the years. Cousin Margaret was stone deaf when she died and had been so for some twenty years when she first held me in her arms. Indeed, she was already losing her hearing when my father was born in 1890. Born in 1876, she began to have hearing problems when she was nine; by 1900, she was totally deaf.

Cousin Margaret saw the transition from the horse-drawn preelectric age to the age of television and outer space as well as those changes wrought by two world wars. She was born the year the telephone was invented, born into a world in which the utmost in speedy communication was the telegraph (delivered by boys on bicycles), used in metropolitan areas like New York for in-town messages by the well-to-do much as we use a cell phone today.

Messengers were summoned by a bell-pull in the house that activated a switch outside connected to the local telegraph office. The latter was an important selling point since it meant that "the electricity," something not yet trusted, was kept outside the house. Elsewhere, the telegraph usually signaled illness or death. Outside of the business world, the arrival of a telegram was a frightening event.

It was a time when most houses still relied on either candles or kerosene lamps, though a few in the big cities had gaslight; a world in which the fastest available transportation was the train, or "the cars" as trains were called. Stagecoach feeder lines existed for those who lived far from the railroad, much as buses today ferry passengers from airports to outlying districts. Horse-cars were the standard mode of public street transportation for those who had no carriages; the cable car, now only found in San Francisco, had just been invented but had not yet to found its way to the streets of New York.

In Cousin Margaret's youth, steam-powered elevated trains began to rattle above the New York streets, affording passengers a view of the unfortunate occupants of second- and third-floor apartments, scattering ashes on pedestrians below, and frightening the horses. In my own youth, trains still rattled above, but they were electric-powered. Almost all ocean-going ships were still made of wood and propelled by sail, though passenger vessels were driven by steam. A great deal of freight, indeed, was still carried in square-rigged and schooner ships until World War I.

Cousin Margaret saw the conquest of many of the diseases, such as typhoid fever and diphtheria, that had been dreaded household words in her youth. Even the cancer that carried off her sister and brother had become more controllable by the time of her death, if caught in time. Otherwise, the only parallel today is, for the most part, AIDS, though that is not now the killer it once was.

During her lifetime, Cousin Margaret saw the invention of incandescent electric light, the electric motor, the combustion engine, radio, the "flying machine," radar, and television. At the very end of her lifetime, man had invaded space, though she did not live to see the first man on the moon. Had she done so, she probably would have asked what good it might do.

Spiritually, however, she remained in that older world, a world of peace, comfort, and stability for her, even with her handicap. It seems possible to me that she may have clung to Open Country out of unwillingness to give up the last remnant of the world of her youth. It is a world now remembered by very few. I am acutely conscious of this because it was my world, too, and I find that few people understand, or are interested in, the world into which I was born.

Hers was the world rosily and lovingly described by Sir Winston Churchill as the "Sunset Age," a world that had not known major war for a hundred years in Europe, a time of peace, comfort, and tranquility for those with money and social position. (Sir Winston did not involve himself with the "lower orders," those who labored, cooked, and cleaned—and inhabited the appalling slums of London and the industrial Midlands.)

Servants were abundant, and the care lavished on the well-educated well-to-do gave them time to cultivate the arts of living. It was a leisured age, one in which people had time to devote to the amenities, to conversation and letter writing. Telephones were awkward instruments whose fidelity was poor, and "long distance" was reserved for major crises.

(Continues...)

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