a stretch of highway packed with big trucks in a hurry and tense commuters snarled in traffic jams—drivers so stressed-out by trying to make ends meet in the glittery pressure cooker that is Greater New York that they cut you off, cursing or gesturing obscenely in the process. In 1948, two perfect strangers in two separate cars were driving east out of Manhattan after work. Henry was a lamp buyer and Molly was a saleslady at Macy’s. It was a Friday afternoon and traffic was bad. Somewhere in Queens, Henry’s Chevy rear-ended Molly’s Ford.
Now the boy’s Irish Catholic mother, Molly, who was raised on a Bridgehampton potato farm, used to say that the crash and the meeting that followed was an “act of God, a bit of grace.” Like a lot of Irish folks, she tended to attribute divine meaning to things. Otherwise, when the boy asked Mom how she met Dad, she would only be able to say, “Well, Dad plowed into my car on the LIE and he looked pretty good.”
When the boy was at St. Paul’s, he had to give a chapel talk one morning about how little control we have over how we enter this life. So he told the story of how his parents met, which was shocking to the elite student body who were a little too high-brow to think well of marriages born on the road, and especially on the LIE.
The boy said, “Yup, Dad just rear-ended Mom on the LIE.” Everyone laughed, and the boy couldn’t figure out why until Rector Matt Warren, the imposing headmaster, tapped the boy’s shoulder and asked, “Would you possibly be referring to her automobile?”
“Yes, Sir, her automobile, of course, Sir!” he responded.
“That’s better,” said the Rector. “Be careful with words.”
The boy had no love for the LIE, that noisy, ugly, congested slab of concrete covered with fumes, and he avoided it for the most part because of the trucks. But he had to affirm it as key to his conception. If there had been no crash, he would not have gotten his start as a zygote a few years later. He tended to view that crash as synchronicity in action; there was clearly nothing rational or normal about how his parents met.
How Mr. and Mrs. Muller Taught the Boy
Wise old Mr. Karl Muller and Mrs. Muller saved the boy in every way that a kid can be saved, especially spiritually.
The boy at age five
The boy’s family lived a very long seventy miles east of Manhattan where culture mostly meant boats, clamming, and drinking on the beach or at yacht club parties. The sand at the end of Oak Neck Lane was littered with beer cans and broken bottles, so kids would sometimes slice their feet when they went swimming and have to head to Good Samaritan Hospital.
When the boy was six years old, there were no kids his age on the lane. Mom worried that he spent too much time by himself and encouraged him to “go out and do something for someone.”
“Okay, Mom, I’ll go to Mr. and Mrs. Mullers’ place.”
He was gone for the rest of the day. He headed down the street about a quarter mile to the Mullers’ little white house, walked up the back steps to the second story over the garage, and knocked on their door. The Mullers had no children of their own. They were well into their seventies and more quietly reflective than effusive, but there was a depth about them, and they always welcomed the boy. They kept a cross on the wall in their kitchen and a Bible on the table just below it. They did not drink, but Mr. Muller smoked some. The Mullers didn’t have a lot of wealth, but they were at peace: simple folks, unpretentious, plainly dressed, like in a spiritually evocative Rembrandt painting. Mr. Muller had a pension because he had worked for years building airplanes for Grumman, which was a big deal on Long Island before it moved away.
“Mr. Muller, I’m here to do something for you, like maybe rake leaves or rake the gravel on the driveway. Is that okay with you? Mom sent me.”
Karl Muller rose and walked down the steps with the boy to find something for him to do. The boy got two nickels for his work.
“Save it so you can go to a good school one day,” he told the boy. That seemed like sound advice, and the boy thought that Mr. Muller seemed like he would be a good manager for a young kid to have.
Mr. Muller also told him, “Boy, you get a lot done, but you seem kind of old for a kid of six. That’s good, but you’ve got lessons ahead of you, and hard lessons are learned hard. That’s the only way. No one can learn your lessons for you.”
“Why can’t I learn from other people’s mistakes? Do I just have to learn from my own?”
“You can learn from others, but not the hard stuff.”
Mr. Muller was a Presbyterian who believed rightly that human nature is a mixed bag. He smiled some, and when he did it was a warm, generous smile, but he didn’t smile all the time.
“Smiling is okay. Be cheerful, but never trust people who smile all the time,” he said. “They are just after your nickels. The thing about people is, they’re never all that good, none of them, and you have to tolerate them as best you can and forgive them because you can’t change human nature.”
Mr. Muller was quite pessimistic in a nice way.
“What does ‘tolerate’ mean, Mr. Muller?”
“You can’t expect anyone to be too good. If they are real good it isn’t actually them, it’s God in them.”
To be good at clamming, you have to know where the clams are. When Mr. Muller and the boy went clamming in the Mullers’ little flat boat, Mr. Muller’s method for finding the clams was to offer a brief, improvised prayer: “Dear Lord, we have faith that there are clams out here today, but we don’t know where they are. Please guide us to the best spot, if it be Your loving will, because we can’t clam unless we know where they are just like You do. Amen.”
When they did very well and harvested a lot of clams, they figured that prayer was the reason why.
They also raked hard, standing on the deck.
Mr. Muller taught the boy that “God does the finding, but you do the digging.”
He also had the boy memorize Bible passages, and they burned some of them into wood planks and then varnished them before nailing them to the trees all around Mr. Muller’s property. They did the same with lines from Robert Frost poems and read aloud together pretty much all of Frost’s stuff in the living room by the fireplace.
“Are you reading the Bible I gave you every day at home?” Mr. Muller asked the boy.
They read a lot of Bible passages and talked about them. Mr. Muller gave the boy extra nickels for knowing Bible quotes, King James style, including book, chapter, and verse. The boy went home and underlined them, including the words of the prophets and Jesus and St. Paul, and that explains a little why he was attracted to St. Paul’s School, and why he knew the blue angel dream was more than a reaction to dyspepsia.
Mr. Muller taught him a lot of other things, including, “Don’t expect gratitude for helping people out, don’t expect people to clap for you.”
He also taught that “God loves a cheerful giver.”15 They burned that passage into a piece of wood, did the varnishing in the garage, and up it went on an oak tree along the driveway.
“It’s good to give, and don’t ever be sad about
