The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [164]
Bertie, always the least troubled by her mother’s behavior and the least dependent on her father, now found her life the least changed by her father’s death. Like Warren, however, her relationship with money both triggered her anxieties and gave her a sense of control. She kept records of every dollar she spent, and when she felt stressed she paid bills to relax.
All of the Buffetts had “issues” with money that ran so deep none of them really noticed what an unusual family they were. After Howard’s death, Warren and Susie naturally assumed leadership of the family—partly because of their money, but also through the force of their personalities. Leila and Doris and Bertie looked to Warren and Susie for support, and so did virtually everyone else. Warren’s uncle Fred Buffett and his wife, Katie, who now owned the grocery store, gave Warren a run for his money in the family’s cheapskate contest. They were especially attached to Warren and Susie, and grew more so as their nephew’s stature and wealth increased. Leila, who had always been jealous of her sister-in-law, fixated on an incident many years before in which Ernest had danced with the vivacious Katie and not her at a Rotary Club dance. Now she grew even more jealous of Katie, and Susie—who was trusted by everyone—had to juggle visits to separate them. Given all the work to separate Leila from Warren and from Katie, Susie was an expert juggler by the time she had nursed Howard through his final illness. Perhaps it was not surprising, therefore, that Warren’s aunt Alice, his favorite relative since childhood, had grown to trust Susie more than anyone else in the family except him.
So it was Susie, not Leila, whom Alice tracked down one Monday in late 1965. Susie was at the beauty parlor with Doris when the call came. She got out from under the dryer to go to the phone at the front desk; Alice explained that she was concerned about Leila’s sister Edie, who had called her on Sunday to say she was feeling extremely depressed. Alice, a fellow teacher, had taken Edie for a drive and talked to her, and they had stopped for ice cream. Edie idolized Warren and Susie and Alice, indeed all the Buffetts; she confided that she felt she had disgraced the perfect family with her imperfect life.2 Her impulsive, high-spirited marriage had not worked out; the husband she had followed to Brazil had turned out to be a philandering embezzler who left her there for someone else. Since returning from Brazil, she had found it hard adjusting to life as a divorced single mother of two daughters in Omaha.
Alice told Susie that today Edie hadn’t shown up at Technical High School to teach her home economics classes. Worried, Alice had gone over to Edie’s apartment. Nobody answered when she rang and knocked. Alice told Susie that she feared that something had happened.
So Susie raced out the door to her gold Cadillac convertible, with her rollers still in her hair, drove over to the garage apartment where Edie lived, and started knocking and ringing herself. When nobody answered, she got inside somehow and began to search. She found no sign of anybody; the place was immaculate. There were no notes or messages and Edie’s car was there. Susie continued searching until she reached the basement of the house, and there she found Edie. She had slit her wrists, and was already dead.3
Susie called an ambulance, then had to break the news to the family. No one had known that Edie was this depressed, and nobody had seriously considered her a possible victim of the Stahl family’s history of mental instability until now.
Those whom Edie had left behind worked through a complex web of feelings: guilt that she had been so desperate without their realizing it; pity that she may have seen herself as so inferior to the Buffetts; grief at the loss. Warren, Doris, and Bertie were shaken and sad at the loss of a kind, loving aunt whom they had been extremely fond of