Saints and Sinners: The cabbie was always Mr. Boyle
Summertime always makes me think of Ruth Lyman. Of course, I never called her Ruth. To me and the other young people at King’s Chapel in Boston, she was always Mrs. Lyman — or Granny.
Many were the stimulating evenings spent at her house in Brookline, Mass., or in Northeast Harbor, Maine, where we would vacation for a few weeks in the summer and talk about God and life and many other things.
Mrs. Lyman was perhaps one of the last true Proper Bostonians. She also had a marvelous salutary effect on everyone who came into her presence.
There was the time when Jenny, her maid, knocked on the parlor door and asked if she could sit with Mrs. Lyman for a little while.
“My bunions always feel better when I am with you,” she said. Mine always did, too, though not in a literal sense.
I didn’t really have bunions, you see, but Mrs. Lyman always had a way of making the little aches and pains and loneliness go away.
She was an affectionate reminder of the better things in life — good manners, good companionship and good conversation.
“Good company,” my son Joel once wrote, “is thought’s best sustenance and stimulus.” Mrs. Lyman was good company.
And she was a wise mentor.
“Don’t be too vivid,” she once told me after I had let my imagination run wild in describing something in a sermon. I have remembered that ever since.
I was 27 when I first met Mrs. Lyman at King’s Chapel. She was 71. For the first year of our acquaintance she called me Mr. Plagenz. When she came later to call me George, I felt I had somehow earned my way into her circle of close friends. I felt special.
I have nothing against our modern practice of calling everybody by his or her first name from the time we are first introduced. But I wonder if our habit of being so democratic about everything means there is nothing special any more.
Mrs. Lyman, like other Bostonians of her day and class, never descended to our level of instant or easy familiarity.
She even called her favorite cab driver “Mr. Boyle.” It conferred a certain dignity and was responsible, I am sure, for the almost soldierly bearing with which Mr. Boyle carried himself — all 300 pounds of him.
Mrs. Lyman didn’t own a car. She felt there were already too many cars on the highways, so she rode in cabs.
She always tried to get Mr. Boyle’s cab, but that was not always possible. The other drivers soon learned that Mrs. Lyman did not like to go fast. “Don’t hurry, driver,” she would always say.
Mr. Boyle never hurried.
Jimmy McCoy knew Mrs. Lyman was rich, but he never realized how rich she was until one summer’s morning when she announced they would be going to Maine that day to open the house in Northeast Harbor for the season.
Mr. Boyle was called and they headed for the train station – or so Jimmy thought. But when they passed Trinity Place Station and Mr. Boyle kept driving, the truth dawned on Jimmy. They were taking a cab to Maine, 300 miles north! Taking the streetcar to work in East Cleveland where Jimmy lived was never like this.
(George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.)