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 an