news-record.com

Once in a while, on an outwardly calm sea, a story breaks loose from its moorings and veers into uncharted waters.

Such was the riddle behind of a packet of love letters — found stashed in an old piano bench in Fisher Park — written by a mystery woman named Ophelia to her beau, Charles, and postmarked 1937.

The letters turned up recently when the Cantrell family moved to a home on Eugene Street and prepared to sell the old upright piano.

“The letters were sentimental and really personal,” said Ann Cantrell, who recalled treasuring her own parents’ and grandparents’ letters from when they were young.

“These were someone’s property, and I hated to just throw them away. I thought it was my duty to try to find their granddaughter and return them to their rightful owner.”

Cantrell, a paralegal, researched the matter and wrote to the last-known descendant of a family that had years ago sold the antique piano bench to her husband Bruce Cantrell, a Greensboro architect, but she got no response.

Cantrell’s next thought was to call the newspaper. Who can resist a bittersweet love story?

At first blush, the letters are a window on a more courtly period. It was an era of waiting and wondering, of getting stood up at the intersection of desire and rejection, no MapQuest, no text messages, only overheated letters that take a lifetime to arrive.

“My dearest Charlie,” Ophelia writes, “Do you have any objection to my calling you that? But right now, on second thought, I like Charles the best...”

As we first meet her, Ophelia is a naive coed who has been sent to a North Carolina college (she calls it a “jailhouse”) by her strict Baptist parents.

Whether cramming for an English exam or headed for Sunday chapel, she always finds time to dash off a few paragraphs with the neat flourish of a fountain pen to Charles, who lives in a nearby town and is “the sweetest person in the whole wide world.”

Charles has bought her a cigarette case — her mother knows she smokes, Ophelia writes. Watchful as her parents are, Charles has one point in his favor. Charles is a Baptist, Ophelia notes, and her father feared he might be a Catholic.

There are postcard invitations simply signed “O.” to campus pep rallies, and a small booklet of the sort of black-and-white snapshots people used to have made. They show a man and woman posed, the woman looking happy, the man looking awkward, exposed.

“Yours forever, Ophelia,” she closes, “(P.S. I like you to close your letters, 'I love you.’)”

They have only known each other for a matter of months, but she begins to find him elusive. With a roommate, she goes to his nearby town and gets lost, waiting for hours on a street corner, checking every grill and diner for him.

By winter break, the tone grows worried and hurt:

“Dearest Charles,

My mind is all upset and I don’t know what to think. I had counted so much on being with you during the holidays and upon my soul, I didn’t even get one peep at you! ...”

Finally, despair, catastrophe.

“Dearest Charles,

I’ve looked all in vain for a letter from you either yesterday or this morning. But due to the fact I didn’t get one, I’m supposing everything is over with between us and I’m sorry...”

How then, did their long-ago story end? Was this just a bump in the road, after which they patched things up, and went on to live happily ever after with children and grandchildren?

The only person who could answer this was the granddaughter of the people who had sold the piano bench to Cantrell, many years ago.

The granddaughter had moved once or twice, had an unlisted number, but, once located last week, verified with no hesitation that the “Charles” in the 1937 letters was, positively, her grandfather.

But one problem: The name of her grandmother was not Ophelia. Or anything close. And there was another problem.

“He would have been married then. And I don’t know anyone named Ophelia,” said Charles’ granddaughter, who is now in her 60s and preferred to remain anonymous. “My grandfather had affairs. He and my grandmother were always at each other’s throats.”

In the end, Ophelia didn’t finish that coed year quite as naively as she began it. In her last letter to Charles, she revealed that friends claimed he was married. But she was so smitten by this time, she wanted him back nevertheless.

“I believed every word you said, and I still believe you, but you know things can’t be like one wants them all the time, can they?” she wrote, her ordinarily careful handwriting now rushed and shaky.

“I can’t very well sit down and beg someone to come see me, just because I want to see and talk to them.”

So Charles broke Ophelia’s young heart — or saved it for someone more worthy — and went back to his sour marriage or on to another affair.

Needless to say, his granddaughter didn’t want to take possession of these particular family heirlooms.

Nor did Ann Cantrell want them back, not even the brittle 1935 Charlotte Observer with the Lindbergh kidnapping trial headline on one page and the Vogue patterns on another.

Therefore, after languishing all these years in a piano bench, Ophelia’s photo prints and her unanswered letters are headed for oblivion, faded souvenirs of an affair to forget.

News & Record news researcher Diane Lamb assisted in this report.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com