Where a Mother's last Wish May Lead: Reflections on "My Mother's Lover" by David Dobbs

David Dobbs belatedly begins a journey of truly knowing his mother. It is one that she had been, for many years, intimating as out there waiting to be taken. He is retracing the shape of his mother’s heart. Along the way, he allows us to share his discomfort as he inadvertently finds answers for another woman’s children and they, in turn, fill in blanks in his mother’s past that neither he, nor his siblings and half-sister had never thought to imagine.

First, calling upon his aunt’s memory, Dobbs gains the approximate name of this man who was so much his mother’s soul-mate that news of his death by Japanese anti-aircraft fire near the end of WWII, “just about destroyed [his]… mama. She could not be consoled.”[1] He learns dates and locations—San Antonio, Texas where the couple met, Hawaii where his mother followed her lover, and Iowa. And then, by simple methodical searching of Iowa’s lost soldiers, and the luck of the man’s unusual last name, he finds the records that will lead him to the other family—the one that makes his mother “the other woman” in the story. We pause with Dobbs as he considers whether or not to answer the nineteen questions (plus Dobbs’ original inquiry makes twenty and a chapter title) sent by this man’s son upon receipt of one of the many email inquiries he had sent out in a broad-casting effort to locate relatives of one Captain Norman E. Zahrt.

From there, Dobbs explains, “We began a long collaborative search—dusty records, strained recollections, tree-shaded graveyards,”[2] It is from those records and photos, some described in emotional and speculative significance and as well as included in the piece, and physical visits to read headstones and walk hometown streets that he builds a careful narrative of the lovers, the war and its upheaval of the social and moral fabric of many other women’s lives in addition to his mother’s—the ten out of ten pregnant female service members who stepped of the transport ship that shuttled Norman and his crew to Saipan.

And the letters. Dobbs had his mother’s collection of letters from her lover (but not her letters to norman). He uses them to provide tone of voice to Norman—to show his war-weariness before his death. A photo reveals his mother’s picture as Norman’s own pin-up-girl in his pacific quarters. That photo becomes a source of concern, for the wife’s sake, Dobbs hopes it never made it back to the states with the deceased’s effects—surely the buddies who made it their business to post a letter to the other woman who would not hear of her lover’s death through official channels would have omitted her letters and picture from the trunk sent to the wife. Surely, Dobbs hoped, as her children probably did, as well.

Dobbs is careful to report the heroic job Zahrt and the Army Air Forces 4^th Emergency Rescue Squadron were engaged in. But he also notes that Zahrt may have been simply looking to escape the oppressive heat when he boarded the B-17 for a rescue flight that ended in his and the entire crew’s deaths because he wasn’t an official member of that mission. He writes his mother’s indictment, “She was chasing a man with two small children. And she was leaving her own 3-year-old, my half-sister Lynn, with the very parents who had abandoned her 20 years prior.”[3] And he acknowledges the probable extent of feelings experienced by Luella, the wife, who was asked for a divorce by her husband so that he could marry Dobbs’ mother—it was at least the third major abandonment in her life.

Finally, Luella is done. When the Army contacts her regarding claiming her husband’s belatedly identified remains, she responds with one question:

Given that she had remarried, was she still next of kin? The quartermaster replied that she was not: Her remarriage gave Norman’s parents the sole right to designate his final disposition. She would hear no more from the Army.[4]

For Dobbs this is a love story. It is the love he shared with his mother and the love she once had with Norman. But it is also the back story to the way that his parent’s marriage failed and his love for his father entitles him to cast his mother’s lover as “daring, … [and] self-absorbed.” [5] For Luella’s children, it completed the story of their pain. It brought full circle the lives of six people who found and lost love, five of them marrying someone else. And Norman’s daughter and the author end laughing together on a patio, somehow feeling like siblings, though not by blood, rather, by a fifty-year-past affair of the heart, by faced shame, and as David Zahrt wrote in his question filled email response to David Dobbs, by “learning to own your scars, and live them.”[6]

For more about David Dobbs visit http://daviddobbs.net/. 

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[1]Dobbs, David (2011-06-05). My Mother's Lover (Kindle Single) (Kindle Locations 75-76). The Atavist. Kindle Edition.

[2] Dobbs, (Kindle Locations 109-110).

[3] Dobbs, (Kindle Locations 168-169).

[4] Dobbs, (Kindle Locations 389-391).

[5] Dobbs, (Kindle Location 449).

[6] Dobbs, (Kindle Location 94).