The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [119]
Susie had her own gentler brand of nonconformity. She began to bring Warren into her unusually diverse network of friends. Since high school, she had prided herself on her openness and her commitment to inclusiveness at a time when most people chose friends who were religious, cultural, ethnic, and economic clones. Unlike her own family, Susie did not think this way, and many of her friends—and by this time many of Warren’s—were Jewish. In segregated Omaha—not to mention within the Buffett and Thompson families—choosing to cross these social lines was a bold, even defiant act. Susie was aware of this, just as she had been aware in high school and college that dating a Jew was considered shocking. Although she came from a prominent family, social status had value to her mostly as a way to make her friends feel more included. Warren, the anti-elitist, found this aspect of Susie highly attractive. And the Jewish friends he’d made at Columbia and while working for Graham-Newman had opened his eyes to anti-Semitism.
In contrast to Susie, Warren’s mother had always been obsessed with fitting in. Leila had researched her ancestry and joined the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Huguenot Society, perhaps searching the past for a stability that she could not find in the present, and certainly not in her immediate family. She had recently received word from Norfolk State Hospital that her sister Bernice had thrown herself into the river in an apparent suicide attempt. Leila, now responsible for Bernice and their mother, handled their affairs in businesslike fashion, striving to be a dutiful daughter while keeping some distance from the family’s problems. She and her sister Edie went to visit Bernice and their mother periodically, Leila with less enthusiasm. The Stahl family’s history of mental illness was a threatening and shameful topic in the Buffett family, just as it was in society as a whole at the time. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, Ward and June Cleaver, the prototypical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American families so ubiquitous on television that they seemed to define an idyllic sort of normality, did not have mentally ill or suicidal family members. The Buffetts’ perception of the family history was further muddied by uncertainty over Stella’s and Bernice’s diagnoses. The doctors could give only vague descriptions of what were clearly serious problems. Obviously, however, the mental illness was inherited, and it manifested in adulthood. Warren and Doris, who were close to their aunt Edie, knew that their mother had grown apart from her as Edie, too, had become more impulsive and moody. They had some suspicions that Leila’s own behavior and personality might be at least partly related to the family lineage. The ticking clock hung over them, and they examined themselves for any signs of abnormality.
Warren, who desperately wanted to be but had never felt “normal,” assuaged his anxiety with statistics, reasoning that the mysterious disorder seemed to affect only the family’s women. He never dwelled on the unpleasant. He would later come to think of his memory as functioning like a bathtub. The tub filled with ideas and experiences and matters that interested him. When he had no more use for information, whoosh—the plug popped up, and the memory drained away. If new information about a subject appeared, it would replace the old version. If he didn’t want to think about something at all, down the drain it went. Certain events, facts, memories, and even people appeared to vanish. Painful memories were the first to be flushed. The water went somewhere, and along with it might go context, nuance, and perspective, but what mattered was that it was gone. The bathtub memory’s efficiency freed up enormous amounts of space for the new and the productive. At times, however, disturbing thoughts did bubble up from somewhere, as when he expressed concern for other people: for example, several friends who cared