As we buried Papa at Oak Hill Cemetery, I thought back to that frigid winter evening when we’d first stepped off the train in Battle Creek: Papa, Mother, and I making our way to Mrs. Gregory’s home with the last of our hopes and savings. This city had changed Papa, transforming him from a cripple to a giant, and he’d gone ahead and changed the city—and indeed, the world—right back.
As I turned to leave the cemetery, feeling simultaneously empty and also leaden with weight, I met a familiar face. “Hi there, Budgie.”
I inhaled a quick breath; age had drawn a brush across the man’s withered skin and weary features, but I knew him in an instant. “Shorty Bristol,” I gasped, leaning into a hug. My father’s right-hand man from the earliest days of the white barn, Shorty now stood before me with a sad, smiling face. Shorty looked, well, shorter, and I saw that a nurse stood nearby with a wheelchair at the ready. Goodness, this man who had once been Papa’s constant companion, once the image of vigor and health, a faithful steward of Papa’s hopes and successes—how had time caught them both with such a ruthless reckoning?
* * *
—
As the initial shock of his suicide settled, America seemed to join me in mourning, in bidding farewell to the man who had forever changed how we started each day. Telegrams poured in, heaps of flowers, letters and cards written by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Henry Ford, members of the Rockefeller and Vanderbilt and Carnegie clans. In a welcome contrast to the articles that had gushed with gory details, now the newspapers spoke about how admired and beloved Papa was. I focused on those pieces, vowing never to read another negative word about my father. What’s done was done; I could not change it.
Instead I could choose to remember my daddy with all that was worth celebrating about him. And there was so much of that; I wept as I read about how Papa had created an industry, how even his business competitors had respected and liked him. How he had represented the promise of America’s new century, how he’d been the one-man symbol to so many of hope, hard and honest work, and opportunity. How his generosity had known no limits. And how he had loved his country, his work, his employees, and yes, me, his only child, the blue-eyed girl whose image had so closely resembled his and who had graced the labels of his earliest products.
* * *
—
But the battle for whether I would be the heir to all of Papa’s good and all of Papa’s millions was just beginning. I had never trusted Leila, even in my girlhood, when she’d been all smiles and honeyed confidences—and I’d been correct in my dislike.
“She plans to fight you for it,” Eddie said, sitting with me in our Greenwich drawing room after we’d returned home to the girls. I was still in my head-to-toe black, and I fiddled restlessly with my skirt, picking at a piece of loose thread in the stitching. Ed went on, “You’re not the only one who has hired lawyers.”
I looked up, meeting my husband’s pale eyes. “What could they possibly be saying?” I asked.
Ed frowned as he showed me one of that day’s headlines: Post Millions Likely to Cause Family Fight!
I glowered. “That woman is no family of mine.”
Eddie cocked his head. “But her attorneys assert that your father’s final will bequeathed fifty percent of his millions to you and…well, fifty percent to—”
“To that woman?”
Ed nodded. “Your father split the Texas land evenly between the two of you. He intended for everything in Battle Creek and California to go to Leila. He left you The Boulders.”
Land in Texas and California and even Battle Creek, that was one thing. But then Ed went on: “It’s not just the matter of the land or the money, Marjorie.” I didn’t like his tenuous tone.
“Then what is it?” I asked.
Ed puffed out a long sigh before saying, “Your father, well, he split the Post Cereal Company between the two of you, as well. Right down the middle, half the stock for you and—”
“Half of the company for Leila?”
When Ed nodded, my stomach curdled, and I lifted a weary hand, imploring him not to go on. It was an outrage. Papa, Mother, and I had started Post Cereal together in our backyard, with Mother’s money getting it all going. Both Mother and Papa had told me all my life that it would remain in our family, in my family’s hands in particular. All the talk of Papa’s being sick in both body and mind in his final days was making a grim sort of sense; how else could he have considered leaving half of our family’s company to her?