Heir Conditioning at Open Country

Chapter 1 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 showed 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, 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.

he acrid odor of boxwood struck my nostrils, the only tangible remnant of all I 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.