The Invitation

THE HOPETOWN GAZETTE

Sunday Edition. June 15, 1987. Forty Years Since the Crown.

I Was Invited to the Mountain. The Invitation Is in My Handwriting. It Was Mailed in 1946.

A Gazette reporter received a sealed envelope from a country that no longer exists, addressed to a newspaper that did not yet exist, written in a hand she knows better than her own face. Tonight she is going up to find out who sent it.

By Vera Osskind, Gazette Staff

HOPETOWN. By the time this edition reaches your doorstep I will be standing at the foot of the Carbowee tramway with a pass in my coat pocket, waiting for a car that has not carried a paying passenger in living memory. I have covered strikes, floods, two funerals I should not have been allowed into, and a city council that once voted to rename a river. I have never before filed a story that I may be the subject of. This is that story.

The Envelope

It came up from the post office on the second of June in the ordinary sack, between a water bill and a reader who would like us to know, again, about the potholes on Foundry Street. A cream envelope, heavy stock, gone the color of weak tea at the corners. Addressed in fountain pen to Miss Vera Osskind, The Hopetown Gazette, Hopetown.

The postmark reads Vintenshad, Poste Royale, 2 May 1946. The stamp carries the profile of a young prince in a high collar, the last issue the Royal Post ever printed. Across the back flap, in the same pen, a line of Aulnois: Ne pas remettre avant le premier juin mil neuf cent quatre-vingt-six. Do not deliver before the first of June, nineteen eighty-six.

Let me lay out the problems in order, because order is what I have instead of sleep. In May of 1946 there was no Hopetown. There was no Gazette. The company that built this town and prints this paper would not pour its first foundation for another twelve years. And on the second of May 1946, Vera Osskind was eleven days old.

I asked at the post office. The sorting house on Lantern Row was the Royal Post before it was anything else, and the old hands there will tell you, with a kind of pride, that the last order the Royal Post ever issued was to honor every hold on its books. So for forty years this envelope sat in a locked cabinet in a building that changed flags twice, under an instruction from a government that no longer exists, and every clerk who inherited the cabinet kept the promise. Nobody opened it. Nobody asked who I was. On the first of June a man named Pell unlocked the drawer, saw the date had come, and put it in the sack. He told me he was glad to finally be rid of it. He said it hummed.

Inside were three things.

The first is a tramway pass. Pasteboard, printed in crimson and gold, Funiculaire du Carbowee, admettez un, admit one. It is stamped for tonight. Not for a night in 1946. For tonight, the fifteenth of June, , the date set in type by a printer who has been dead longer than I have been alive.

The second is an invitation to an auction at the Mors Delectamenti Hotel, to be held at half past ten, the guest’s attendance being, in the card’s own phrase, très vivement souhaitée, most keenly desired. One lot is listed by name. The Crown of the Fallen Prince.

The third is a letter. Three pages. Blue-black ink. My hand.

I do not mean a hand like mine. I mean the slant I was beaten for at school and never corrected. The crossed sevens I picked up from my father. The way I let the tail of a g swing back under the word before it like a dog curling up under a table. I have read my own notebooks for nineteen years. I know my handwriting the way I know my teeth.

I took the pages to the documents examiner at the regional police office, a careful man who has testified in four forgery trials and who did not enjoy being asked. He confirmed what I already knew. The paper carries the watermark of the royal mill at Ostrel, which closed in the winter of 1946. The ink has aged in the paper the way only time ages ink. And the writing, in his professional opinion, which he gave me twice and then asked me to leave his office, is mine.

I will not print the letter. Parts of it are nobody’s business. But I will tell you this much. It uses two phrases I have never written down and never said in front of another living person: the name I gave my imaginary friend when I was five, and the last thing my father said to me before the hospital. It tells me I will want to go. It says, you always want to go. And the final line on the third page stops in the middle of a sentence, the way my notes always do when the deadline is on me.

File by

That is where it ends. In my own hand. Mailed forty years ago.

Forty Years Since the Crown

This week marks forty years since the Principality of Vintenshad stopped being a country, and you will notice that nobody in this town is hanging bunting.

For the young readers, and for the ones who have decided not to remember, here it is plain. Vintenshad was small and old and clever. It lived for centuries between larger appetites by being useful and unthreatening, by marrying well and signing everything. The castle on the high bank, the one the company now keeps behind a fence, has an Aulnois name that means the shadow of winter. Our grandparents called it home and meant the whole valley.

In 1933 the heir disappeared. The official record calls it an illness, then a retreat, then stops calling it anything. In 1939 the Reich came over the eastern passes, and a principality that had survived for six hundred years on diplomacy discovered that diplomacy needs someone on the other side of the table. Six years of occupation followed. Every family on Lantern Row has a version of those years. Most of them are kept in drawers.

Then, in the summer of 1945, a young man came down off Carbowee Mountain on foot and said he was the Crown Prince Sarxian, home at last. He was thin as a rake and burned by some sun no one could account for, and with him walked a tall man in a black overcoat whom no one in the record ever names. The Royal Vizier was not with them. The Vizier was never seen again. The prince was crowned that autumn in a castle with half its windows boarded. The stamp on my envelope carries his face.

The old women at the Saturday market will tell you, if you buy enough onions, that he came back different. That he held his fork in the wrong hand. That he cried at the sight of fruit. I report it as they said it. I have no way to weigh it.

It did not matter in the end. The Empire of Vaepres had been weighing the principality on its border for longer than anyone has been alive, and in 1946 it finished deciding. The crown came down that summer. Where the young king went afterward is a question this paper has asked every ten years, on every anniversary, and never once printed an answer to. I asked again this week. I got three answers and a shrug.

Forty years. A country, then an occupation, then a crown for one hard year, then a province, then a company town. Hopetown has seen it all. It just has not been allowed to look at most of it.

The Mountain File

Every newsroom has a drawer it does not open. Ours is in the morgue, bottom row, third cabinet from the boiler, and the tab on it says MOUNTAIN in four different hands. I have been told about it since my first week as a stringer. I opened it on the third of June.

The hotel has been eating reporters for longer than this paper has existed. Here is the short list, as the file keeps it.

In 1951 Teodor Kask of the old Valley Courier bought a ticket on what was left of the tramway service, promised his editor eight hundred words on the haunted hotel, and came down three days later without a notebook. He never wrote another line. He worked the rest of his life as a typesetter, setting other people’s sentences, and when anyone asked him about the mountain he said only that he had been to the bar and the bar had been very nice to him.

In 1962 the Vaepresi state radio sent two men and a reel-to-reel machine to record what their memo calls folkloric material. The machine came back. It was found at the bottom station in the snow, still running on a battery that should have died in an hour. The reel holds eleven hours of a hotel bar on a busy night. Glasses, a piano, a hundred conversations in five languages. Neither man’s voice is on it. Neither man came down.

In 1970, in the worst of the Refrain years, this paper’s own founding editor, Ilse Marrow, went up alone with a camera and a thermos. Her desk is still by the east window. Nobody has used it since. We keep a plant on it, which is the kind of thing a newsroom does instead of grief.

There are others. A student from the university at Vaepres. A woman from a fashion magazine who wanted the ballroom for a spread. A priest. The file has a page for each of them, and the pages get shorter as the years go on, as if the people keeping it got tired of writing the same ending.

And there are the photographs. The file holds every picture of the hotel bar anyone ever smuggled down, nine of them, from a 1920s postcard to a blurred frame off Ilse Marrow’s last roll. In every one of them, in the far corner, at a small table, there is an old woman with her head bent over a notebook. She never looks up. The dress changes with the decade. The posture does not. I have put the nine photographs side by side on my kitchen table every night this week, and I am not going to tell you what I think. I am going to tell you that I have been carrying one of them in my wallet, and I could not tell you why.

The myth haunts reporters because it is the perfect story. Everybody has heard it. Nobody has proven it. Every one of us who opened that drawer believed we would be the one to finally file it. The file says otherwise. The file says the mountain does not want the story told. It wants the teller.

The Company and the Refrain

You cannot write about that mountain without writing about the company, and you cannot write about the company in this town without knowing who owns the presses. I know who owns the presses. I am writing it anyway.

Blind Corp’s corporate papers were filed in 1928, under a longer name almost nobody in town has heard spoken aloud: the Bureau of Liminal Inquiry and Numinous Documentation. It began as a records annex to an order of knights that liked to say it stood above the crowns. After the war, during the confusion that followed the fall, the Bureau bought an estate. The deed is a public document at the land office, if you are patient and polite and bring the clerk a pastry. The estate is the Mors Delectamenti Hotel and every acre of Carbowee Mountain under it. The seller is listed as a religious society that, according to every other record I can find, had no living members by 1947.

Eleven years later the same company bought the valley. It drained the low fields, poured the foundations, built the foundry and the housing blocks and the clinic, and named the whole thing Hopetown. Some of you were here for the ribbon. I was twelve. I remember thinking the name was a kindness.

Then came the Refrain.

Those of you who lived through 1968 to 1971 do not need me to explain, and those of you who did not have been told almost nothing, because almost nothing was ever written down where you could read it. The sirens that went off with no fire. The deaths that kept arriving in tidy clusters, always somebody’s father, always on a weekday. The clinic leaflets about resilience. The company counselors who came to your door with clipboards and asked, very gently, how you were holding up, and wrote the answer down.

I have seen one page of the company’s own paperwork from those years. A source I have protected for eleven years put it in my hands for the length of a cigarette and then took it back. It was a typed summary of a program called Refrain. Most of it was numbers. One number was circled in red pencil. Sixty-seven.

I did not understand it then. I believe I understand it now. I believe somebody wanted to know how much of a town could be broken before the town stopped working, and had a target in mind, and missed it.

Because Hopetown did not break. That is the part nobody in the company newsletter will ever say out loud. The foundry walked out. The housing blocks stopped answering the door. People hid their neighbors. The woman who ran the diner on Foundry Street that winter, who told her regulars she was only passing through, looking for her sister, kept the coffee going all night for anyone who did not want to be home when the sirens went. The experiment, whatever it was, failed, because the people it was run on did the one thing nobody had budgeted for. They refused.

And then the program ended, and the files went somewhere, and the town has spent fifteen years trying to read its own past through a keyhole. The public library’s microfilm for 1970 is missing four reels. The clinic’s records burned in a fire nobody reported. Every family has a gap in the photo album. We are a town of people looking at an empty shelf and trying to remember what used to stand on it.

The company owns the town. The company owns the mountain. And forty years ago somebody in a principality that was about to die mailed me a ticket to its auction.

Why I Am Going

My editor read this piece on Friday and asked me, in the voice he saves for funerals and budget meetings, whether I had considered not going. I told him I had considered it for about as long as it takes to light a cigarette. He asked what I expected to find. I told him the truth, which is that I expect to find the end of a sentence.

Here is what I know. A country died forty years ago. In its last weeks somebody inside it knew my name, my newspaper, my town, and the date I would be ready to read a letter, and wrote it all down in my handwriting. The same mountain that took Teodor Kask’s notebook and two radio men and Ilse Marrow is owned by the company that ran an experiment on the people reading this paper. And the only lot at tonight’s auction is the crown of the prince who walked down off that mountain and was never seen again after the year he wore it.

Those are not five stories. That is one story, and it has been sitting in a locked cabinet on Lantern Row waiting for me since before I could hold my head up.

I know how this reads. I have read the file. I know every name in that drawer believed they would be the one. I know that the thing I am best at, the thing I have built my whole life on, is walking toward the room everyone else is walking away from, and I know that is not the same thing as courage. But this town has spent forty years being told to look away from its own history, and I have spent nineteen years refusing to look away from anything. Somebody has to go up and get the quote.

So I am packing a steno pad, three pens, a pocket recorder with fresh batteries, and the photograph from my wallet. I will file from the top if they have a telephone. I will file from the bottom if they do not. Either way, you will hear from me.

The story is too good to pass on. It always is.

Vera Osskind has covered Hopetown for the Gazette since 1967.

Editor’s note: Ms. Osskind filed this piece on the afternoon of June 14. Her regular Thursday column will resume on her return.