“In the name of The Father, The Son, The Holy Ghost, Amen,” Theresa’s will began. “Blessed and praised forevermore be the Holy and Undivided Trinity.”1 On first glance, Arthur Holmes—Theresa’s nephew, and one of two executors of her estate—saw that there was about $20,000 in the bank, $3,000 in assorted jewellery, a $200 Pierce Arrow car (which Theresa had earmarked for him), and $5,000 worth of religious paintings. On paper, there was roughly $2 million of assets, but most of it was tied up in real estate and stocks. It wasn’t money you wanted to touch during the Depression unless you absolutely had to.2
The executors were also facing the long-term effects of Theresa’s stubborn streak. She had refused to pay the succession tax on Ambrose’s estate. She was in arrears back to 1924, and now there would be a similar bill on her estate. (All told, $922,304.22 was owed to the province in “succession duties” on both estates.3) Theresa may have been a millionaire on paper, but there was very little liquidity.
Before anybody understood that reality, the Sisters of Service looked to be the early winners. They were due to receive $5,000 a year, all of Theresa’s religious paintings, and a couple of future payouts, including the residue of the estate.* Father George Daly, the director of the Sisters of Service, tried to be helpful and asked Archbishop McGuigan to have a word with Catholic businessman Frank O’Connor, who was a good friend of the premier. Maybe the government would be willing to negotiate on the succession tax. “It means in the ultimate end so much to the Church at home and abroad,” he wrote to the archbishop.4 (In the end, they did reach a settlement—the estate paid around $300,000 for both Ambrose and Theresa inclusive.5)
Theresa hadn’t singled out the archdiocese for any gifts, but many Catholic organizations were lined up for a one-time payment of $5,000: St. Augustine’s Seminary, the Jesuits, the Redemptorist Fathers, the St. Francis Xavier China Mission Seminary, the Monastery of the Precious Blood, the Catholic Truth Society, the Carmelite Sisters of the Divine Heart, the Sisters of Misericorde, and the Loretto Ladies School and Colleges. Theresa had also set aside more than $15,000 for a few religious organizations and priests “to be used for masses for my soul”; had earmarked $5,000 for masses for her parents; and allotted $2,000 for prayers for the souls of priests who had given her the “Blessed Sacrament” in her lifetime.6 “Mrs. Small Wills Millions to Nuns” and “R.C. Sisters and Church Get Fortune,” the headlines screamed in capital letters as the content of the will began to leak. There were some notable absences: The Sisters of St. Joseph, where Theresa had studied as a young woman, were not included. Neither were the Basilian fathers, who had married her and Ambrose back in 1902.
There were one-time gifts for nieces, a “little blind girl,” and Theresa’s “faithful maid,” and yearly allowances of $5,000 for her niece and nephew (and Ambrose’s siblings) Percy and Madeleine, and for some of her brothers and sisters, depending on their needs. The executors and lawyers worried that the siblings who received nothing might say that Theresa wasn’t in her right mind when she’d written the will in 1931, or charge that the will was “procured under influence” perhaps by the Sisters of Service and the Redemptorist Fathers—both organizations that Father George Daly was connected with.7 (Executor Arthur Holmes “did not seem to think that the allegation (of a lack of mental competency) was entirely groundless,” one lawyer noted.8) They knew if a challenge was filed, it would look bad in the press: the Kormann family versus the Catholic Church.
The forgotten were already circling. Some of the family members had retained a lawyer and were talking about a settlement. There was a friend of Theresa’s who demanded money for a painting Theresa had damaged, and a former chauffeur who said that Theresa had docked him money from his pay for a rat-infested apartment in the garage over on the Sisters of Service property. “In justice to me I don’t think I should have paid five dollars a week for a place I couldn’t use, to suit the whim of an old lady,” he wrote. “I think I should be given some consideration for that money.”9
But all of those issues were minor. The real trouble lurked in a handwritten court ledger at City Hall, thick with decades of betrayal and hurt feelings. On every page of the surrogate court book of caveats were the names of people who challenged a will in court. It wasn’t Theresa’s siblings who added their names to the periwinkle pages, but Patrick Sullivan and Florence Small. They believed the estate of Theresa Small was the ill-gotten gains of fraud, perjury, and forgery, because Theresa Small was the person who was responsible for the death of Ambrose Small, and they had the confession to prove it.
* When the Small sisters died, Theresa wanted $100,000 of the $200,000 court-ordered investment from the 1924 settlement to transfer to the Sisters of Service for missionary work.