As John Haffert and his wife, Anne, exit from their new home it is easy to imagine that it is still the roaring twenties and that they and their small estate are right out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories of the famed gold coast along New York’s side of the Long Island Sound. Although the mansion is not large by any means, it requires servants and a gardener for maintenance. There is a blind driveway extending across the property from one block to the next. The front entrance to the property is protected by a very large gate of wrought iron. It has: “thirteen foot ceilings, inlaid parquet floors, a large living room with standing fireplace, and an arched window-wall leading down a wide staircase to the front garden. The big patio, over the three-car garage, overlooked Long Island Sound.”

John and Anne Haffert made a lovely couple. He was a tall, extremely handsome, debonair young man. His wife, Anne, who wore the latest fashions, dazzled her acquaintances with her beauty and charm. Each weekday morning John commuted from his Long Island home to his office in Manhattan. On weekends he and his wife often went sailing on their boat, the Santa Maria. They seemed to possess all of the characteristics that F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of the Great Gatsby, was obsessed with during his lifetime: youth, wealth and beauty.

However, despite these outward appearances, John was hardly a suitable hero for an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. To the contrary, his attitude towards wealth and possessions was, for a layman, so extraordinary that he puts most people to shame. Neither was he searching for meaning in life. He had already found it. His life revolved around God and because of a certain lay Brother’s mystical vision, he was already on the path which was to consume his life.