Review: Survivor of the unfound, a love story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 9, 2011
For as long as her son could remember, his mother wore a gold locket around her neck. "When I was a boy, I liked to pull it up from inside her blouse on its chain, tugging it up from between her breasts so I could squeeze the curved button that ran along one edge," David Dobbs recalls. Open it up and the locket contained a picture of her grandmother and grandfather.After his mother's death, her children discovered another picture behind the first, a snapshot of a smiling, handsome World War II soldier. The photo turned out to be of a man her mother had referred to from time to time as Angus. It was the name she uttered on her deathbed when she said she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes spread on the Pacific, so that she could again be with her Angus.Evelyn Jane Hawkins Preston Dobbs is described by her son David as a "survivor of the unfound." A successful physician in Houston, the mother of six, Evelyn raised a family, was a dutiful wife and mother and was possessed of a "fearsomely strong" character.Sixty years before she had also carried on a secret wartime love affair. Piece by piece, war record after war record and photo by photo, Dobbs reconstructs the World War II love affair between his mother and the flight surgeon whose real name was Norman Zahrt and who was shot down over the Pacific by the Japanese during the final days of the war. At the time of his death, he was married to someone else and the father of two children.It's a soaring story of passion and forbearance as well as love and loss. It's also the story of two families and how they came to terms with the secret wartime romance they never knew about in which "everyone ended up married to somebody they wished was somebody else."Dobbs is a writer and he digs into the story and tracks down the facts with a reporter's flair for getting at the truth of the matter. His account of his mother's lost love is as deeply felt as it is dispassionate.