The Snowball_ Warren Buffett and the Business of Life - Alice Schroeder [38]
The Buffetts had friends, the Reichels11—acquaintances of Howard’s from his stockbroking days—who told them, don’t live in Washington, it’s terrible. They knew of an enormous house in Virginia that someone in the Marines had just vacated. It sat on a hill above the Rappahannock River, next door to Chatham, headquarters of the Union Army in the battle of Fredericksburg. The house had ten fireplaces, formal gardens, cutting gardens, and a greenhouse. Although its grandeur was far above the Buffetts’ style, and it was located almost an hour from the city, they leased it temporarily. Howard rented a tiny apartment in the District of Columbia and commuted on the weekends. His time filled quickly as the Nebraska delegation assigned him to the financial committees, and he started fitting in and learning the rules and procedures and unwritten customs of serving as a Congressman.
Leila soon began riding into Washington to look for a permanent place to live. She had been unusually irritable since their arrival and often spoke longingly of Omaha. The timing of the move had turned out to be inauspicious. Her sister Bernice had just insinuated that she would commit suicide, saying that she would not be responsible for what happened unless the family committed her to the Norfolk State Hospital, where their mother, Stella, was also housed. Edie, now in charge of her sister’s care, consulted with a doctor. They thought that Bernice wanted to live with her mother and was conceivably using melodramatic means to get her way. Nevertheless, they clearly had to take the suicide threat seriously, and the family sent her off to Norfolk.
The details of the Stahl family’s problems were rarely discussed in front of the children. Each adapted to Washington in his or her own way. Beautiful fifteen-year-old Doris felt like Dorothy, who had just left black-and-white Kansas and stepped into the Technicolor land of Oz. Her life was transformed. She became the belle of Fredericksburg and fell in love with the town.12 Leila began to treat her daughter as a social climber who had pretensions above her station, and still launched the occasional tirade against her. But by now, Doris’s spirit resisted her mother’s constraints, and she had begun to fight for her own identity.
Meanwhile, Warren, twelve years old, spent the first six weeks in an eighth-grade class that was “way behind” where he had been academically in Omaha. Naturally, his first instinct was to get a job, working at a bakery where he “did damned near nothing. I wasn’t baking and I wasn’t selling.” At home, furious and miserable at being uprooted, he wanted to be sent back to Omaha and reported a mysterious “allergy” that disturbed his sleep. He claimed that he had to sleep standing up. “I wrote my grandfather these pathetic letters, too, and he sort of said, ‘You’ve got to send that boy back. You know, you’re destroying my grandson.’” Succumbing, the Buffetts put Warren on a train back to Nebraska for a few months’ stay. To his delight, his companion on the train was Nebraska Senator Hugh Butler. He had always gotten along well with older people and chatted easily with Butler, in his precocious manner, all the way back to Omaha, his “allergy” forgotten.
Bertie, nine years old, felt close to her grandfather and thought she had a special bond with him. She was jealous. Trusting in her relationship with Ernest, she wrote him: “Don’t tell my parents, but send for me too.”
“When Bertie wrote the same kind of letters, I said, ‘Don’t pay any attention. She’s a fake.’”13
Ernest wrote back,