My father was unhappy that I decided to go east to medical school. He never told me this. He told my mother, who mentioned it to me many years after the fact. He had wondered aloud why the University of Minnesota wasn’t good enough, or the University of Wisconsin, where he had earned his Ph.D. I think he viewed my choice as surreptitious criticism of him and, although I knew nothing of it then, it created an unspoken cleft between us, one that grew as the years passed.

While he was living in South St. Paul, my father met a young woman whom he took out a couple of times. Poor Dorothy was about as inept at the art of dating as I was. We may have shared educational aspirations, but our backgrounds could hardly have been more different. Everything I said sounded stupid and contrived and in all likelihood was. What does a farm lad tell a history professor’s daughter? How to psych out a mean Holstein bull? Lars Davidsen became a history professor, but he also remained a “farm lad,” and I don’t think he ever reconciled the two. The worst of the regulars at Obert’s were perhaps only steps away from skid row—has-beens, moral and physical wrecks, family disgraces, and each in his own way a failure in life. Nonetheless, there was goodness among them and little hypocrisy. All his life, my father freely distributed his tenderness to the downtrodden, the misshapen, the sorry, and the sad. He never judged the powerless. That was his goodness. It was also his misery. Success, his own, but mine as well, was colored by a feeling of betraying those at home and the ghosts they had left inside him. The irony is that my ambition, if you measure the distances traveled, was finally not as great as my father’s.

I SEE LISA walking into Obert’s Lunch on a Sunday afternoon. It’s a fall day in 1941. Pearl Harbor is yet to come. I imagine a heavy-breasted blonde with blunt features, wearing a trench coat and those short boots to the ankle I’ve seen in period movies. Then I see her and my young father (with a full head of hair) outside on a nearly empty, muddy street. She has her hand on his arm and is speaking to him urgently, but I am too far away to hear what they’re saying.