Imagine a boy born in the last year of World War II to parents who before the war had become the darlings of their town. The father had been a four-letter man at the state university, an open and generous and engaging personality, and his spirited and beautiful bride had matched him stride for winning stride. The son knows his parents both through the legendary stories he has heard about them and, when the father returns from the Battle of the Bulge missing his left leg, as embittered post-war casualties. How to reconcile those two versions of his parents, and of his father especially? That is the subject matter of Father Figure—that quest and the lengths to which the son is willing to go to regain a father he never knew and the efforts of a sister and a past lover to save him before he goes too far.