With Love, As Ever

Letters from the Homefront: Manhattan 1941–1945

“These letters were written to my friend Irv van der Poel with no thought for the future,” Marjorie O’Shaughnessy wrote in 1970. “I did not learn that they were accumulating in a foot locker at Fort Dix until about midway in the war. Irv lent them to me in 1945 as reference material for a privately-printed history of the air-warden service in our zone I was working on at the time. That loan lasted 28 years.”

After she wrote the air-warden history, she decided perhaps her letters could stand on their own as a book. She was right. Whether she’s indulging in word games or questioning the meaning of current events, she quotes Bible scripture and the funny pages with equal aplomb. Her personality is transparent, her compassion and intellect radiating off the page. You imagine Irv van der Poel living from letter to letter, depending on each one to get him through one more day of hell. Despite the specter of war, Marjorie’s life seems not exactly innocent but somehow shimmering with its intergenerational living arrangements, animated conversations about art and literature, and jammed calendar of dinner parties and dances.

Telling detail combined with a refined sense of humor makes for joyful reading even now, nearly seventy years later. Manhattan at the height of its glamour, the homefront during wartime, a lovable protagonist, and a moving ending — these letters are every bit as rich and immediate as the best works of fiction.

This is a story of literary detection and luck, but mostly it is a love story.

Toward the end of a dinner one night, a dear family friend handed me a plastic Lady Foot Locker bag stuffed with pages. He told me an acquaintance in his upper West Side apartment building had given him the package, which he had been carrying around for more than thirty years as he moved to California, back to Manhattan, then to Connecticut, finally landing in his current house in Easthampton. As he ran for his train, he called, “Just let me know what you think.”

The next day, I pulled out the yellowing sheets of typewritten words and began to read. After the first fifty pages, I felt as if I had made a new friend and couldn’t wait to meet this witty, jaunty, delightful woman. I imagined long conversations over dinner and martinis at one of her favorite joints. But first I had to find her.

I called the friend who had given me the manuscript. “I want to get it published,” I said in a rush, “so we’ve got to find the author. Tell me everything you can remember.” He tried but could not come up with any more information than we already knew. So began my three-year quest. I used every clue Marjorie had provided in the letters to try to locate her. Beginning with her last known address in Montclair, New Jersey, I went on to the alumni department of Arts Students League; a member of my church who had retired from the Federal Reserve Board, where Marjorie’s brother-in-law had worked; and the personnel office of a soap opera for which she might have written episodes. I performed endless Google searches on “O’Shaughnessy,” “Clarke,” and every other surname she mentioned. Each time I had a lead, I’d email or write a letter but no one seemed to know anything about Marjorie.

I gradually began to accept the growing possibility that I would never locate this author. According to every legal, literary expert I consulted, if I couldn’t find Marjorie, I had to at least contact her heirs. But that seemed daunting because I knew she had not married or had children.

My first breakthrough was also the saddest. I discovered the month, year, and place of Marjorie’s death (despite the fact that the 1930 Census had her birth date wrong). She died in 1979 at age 70. It made me feel bereft to know I would never be able to meet this remarkable woman, but also determined to introduce her to the rest of the world. The newspaper obituary, which a small town library kept on microfiche, provided the second break: her survivors, according to the paper, included three nieces. Their names were Cynthia Clarke, Margaret Torres, and Alexandra Torres. Now I had new names to Google.

None of them worked.

On a sleepy Friday afternoon months later, for no particular reason, I tried typing in “Alexandra Clarke Torres.” Exactly one result appeared, a list of 1997 New York Public Library Fellowship recipients that included a Brown University lecturer named Alexandra Clarke Torres. I called the department at Brown where Torres had once taught, and a helpful secretary checked the files. Alexandra, who uses her nickname Sasha, had left Brown several years before — but she happened to have a current email address.

For what seemed like the hundredth time, I wrote to a stranger, “Are you by any chance related to a Marjorie O’Shaughnessy?” An hour later I had my answer: “Marjorie was my great-aunt.” Turned out the obit was wrong; Margaret and Cynthia were indeed Marjorie’s nieces. Margaret was the toddler referred to as Toy in the letters. But Sasha is Margaret’s daughter — not Marjorie’s niece, but her grandniece. Margaret had given Sasha the O’Shaughnessy manuscript, but Sasha had never gotten around to reading it. She said her mother would be excited to hear about my interest. I was sure I could now learn more about Marjorie firsthand, get to know her better posthumously.

A few weeks later, I met Marjorie’s niece Margaret at her home in New Jersey. She told me that although her aunt Marjorie never married and had continued to live with and care for her parents until their deaths, she had always been more Auntie Mame than Miss Havisham. She had taken her niece on a European Grand Tour. She published two books, How to Plan and Have a Beautiful Wedding and Make Money at Home, and wrote two unpublished novels. She kept up a hectic social schedule until she died of lung cancer, a victim of all those sophisticated cigarettes.

Then Margaret showed me some old black-and-white photos. There was my author in her fashionable career-woman clothes and her air warden uniform, looking larger than life with a dazzling smile.

Yet driving home, I realized that the woman I had so wanted to meet I had already met, and knew well. Although Marjorie never did get her novels published, she’d be pleased to know that her letters have finally found their way beyond Dear Irv.