Kane & Abel (1979) (5 page)

‘But I don’t mind feeling off-colour for a few months if it means …’

‘I am not talking about feeling off-colour, Mrs Kane. I am talking about not taking unnecessary risks with your life.’

It was a terrible blow for Anne and also for Richard, who had assumed he would sire a large enough family to ensure that the Kane name survived for ever. Now that responsibility had been passed on to William.

Richard, after six years on the board, had taken over as president of the Kane and Cabot Bank and Trust Company. The bank, which dominated the corner of State Street, was a bastion of architectural and fiscal solidity and had branches in New York, London and San Francisco. The San Francisco branch had presented Richard with a problem on the day of William’s birth when, along with the Crocker National Bank, Wells Fargo and the California Bank, it collapsed to the ground, not financially but literally, during the great earthquake of 1906. Richard, by nature a cautious man, was comprehensively insured with Lloyd’s of London. Gentlemen all, they had paid up to the penny, enabling Richard to keep his fortune intact. Nevertheless, Richard spent an uncomfortable year jolting back and forth across America on four-day train journeys between Boston and San Francisco in order to supervise the rebuilding. He opened the new office in Union Square in October 1907, just in time to turn his attention to problems springing up on the Eastern Seaboard. There was a minor run on the New York banks: many of the smaller establishments were unable to cope with unexpectedly large withdrawals, and in some cases had to close their doors. J. P. Morgan, the legendary chairman of the establishment bearing his name, invited Richard to join a consortium to work together during the crisis. Richard agreed. The courageous stand paid off, and life began to return to normal, but not before Richard had had a few sleepless nights.

William, on the other hand, slept soundly, unaware of the significance of earthquakes or collapsing banks; after all, there were swans to be fed, and endless trips to and from Milton, Brookline and Beverley so that he could be shown off to his adoring relatives.

In October of the following year Richard Kane acquired a new toy in return for a cautious investment in a man called Henry Ford, who was claiming that he could manufacture a motor vehicle for the people. The bank entertained Mr Ford to luncheon, and Richard was persuaded to purchase a Model T for the princely sum of $825. Ford assured him that if the bank would back him, the cost could eventually fall to $350, and everyone would want to buy his cars, ensuring a large profit for his backers. Richard did back him: it was the first time he had placed good money with someone who hoped his product would halve in price.

Richard was initially apprehensive that his motor vehicle, sombrely black though it was, might not be regarded as a sufficiently serious mode of transport for the president and chairman of a leading bank, but he was reassured by the admiring glances from the sidewalks that the machine attracted. At ten miles an hour it was noisier than a horse, but it did have the virtue of leaving no mess in the middle of Mount Vernon Street. His only quarrel with Mr Ford was that he would not listen to his suggestion that the Model T be made available in a variety of colours. Ford insisted that every car should be black, in order to keep the price down. Anne, more sensitive than her husband to the approbation of polite society, refused to travel in the back seat until the Cabots had acquired a car themselves.

William, however, adored the ‘automobile’, as the press described it, and immediately assumed that it had been bought to replace his redundant and un-mechanized pram. He also preferred the chauffeur - with his goggles and peaked cap - to his nurse. Grandmother Kane and Grandmother Cabot said they would never travel in such an infernal contraption, and they never did, although many years later Grandmother Kane was driven to her funeral in a motor car, but was not informed of that fact.

During the next two years, the bank grew in strength and size, as did William.

Americans were once again investing for expansion, and large sums of money found their way to Kane and Cabot’s, to be reinvested in such projects as the expanding Lowell leather factory in Lowell, Massachusetts. Richard watched the growth of both his bank and his son with unbridled satisfaction.

On William’s fifth birthday, he took the child out of women’s hands and engaged a Mr Munro, at $450 per annum, to be his private tutor. Richard personally selected Munro from a list of eight applicants who had earlier been screened by his private secretary. His single purpose was to ensure that William would be ready to enter St Paul’s by the age of twelve. William immediately took to his tutor, whom he thought to be very old and very clever. He was, in fact, twenty-three and the possessor of a second-class honours degree in English from the University of Edinburgh.

William quickly learned to read and write, but he saved his real enthusiasm for numbers. His sole complaint was that, of the six daily lessons, only one was devoted to arithmetic. He was quick to point out to his father that one-sixth of the working day might not be enough time for someone who would one day be the president and chairman of a bank.

To compensate for his tutor’s lack of foresight, William dogged the footsteps of any accessible relatives, with demands for sums to be calculated in his head. Grandmother Cabot, who had never been persuaded that the division of an integer by four would necessarily produce the same answer as its multiplication by one quarter found herself quickly outclassed by her grandson; however, Grandmother Kane, who was far more learned than she would admit, grappled manfully with vulgar fractions, compound interest and the division of eight cakes between nine children.

‘Grandmother,’ said William kindly but firmly when she had failed to find the answer to his latest conundrum, ‘you could give me a slide rule, and then I won’t need to bother you again.’

Grandmother Kane was astonished by her grandson’s precocity, but she bought him a slide rule just the same, wondering if he really knew how to use it.

Meanwhile, Richard’s problems began to gravitate further eastward. When the chairman of the London branch died of a heart attack at his desk, Richard found himself required in Lombard Street. He suggested to Anne that she and William accompany him, feeling that the journey would add to the child’s education. After all, he could visit all the places Mr Munro had taught him about. Anne, who had never been to Europe, was excited by the prospect, and filled three steamer trunks with elegant and expensive new clothes in which to confront the Old World. William considered it unfair that she would not allow him to take that equally essential aid to travel, his bicycle.

The Kanes travelled to New York by train to join the
Aquitania
on her voyage to Southampton. Anne was appalled by the sight of the immigrant street traders hawking their wares on the sidewalks. William, on the other hand, was struck by the size of New York; he had, until that moment, imagined that his father’s bank was the biggest building in America, if not the world. He wanted to buy a pink-and-yellow ice cream from a man with a little cart on wheels, but his father would not hear of it; in any case, he never carried small change.

William adored the great liner the moment he saw it, and quickly made friends with the white-bearded captain, who shared with him all the secrets of the Cunard Line’s prima donna. Not long after the ship had left America, Richard and Anne, who had been placed at the captain’s table, felt it necessary to apologize for the amount of the crew’s time their son was occupying.

‘Not at all,’ replied the skipper. ‘William and I are already good friends. I only wish I could answer all his questions about time, speed and distance. I have to be coached every night by the first engineer in the hope of first anticipating and then surviving the following day.’

When the
Aquitania
sailed into Southampton after a ten-day crossing, William was reluctant to leave her, and tears would have been unavoidable had it not been for the magnificent sight of a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost parked at the quayside, complete with chauffeur, ready to whisk them off to London. Richard decided on the spur of the moment that he would have the car transported back to New York at the end of the trip, a decision more out of character than any he would make during the rest of his life. He informed Anne that he wanted to show it to Henry Ford. Henry Ford never saw it.

The family always stayed at the Savoy Hotel in the Strand when they were in London, which was conveniently situated for Richard’s office in the City. During a dinner overlooking the River Thames, Richard learned first-hand from his new chairman, Sir David Seymour, a former diplomat, how the London branch was faring. Not that he would ever have described London as a ‘branch’ of Kane and Cabot while he was on this side of the Atlantic.

Richard was able to conduct a discreet conversation with Sir David, while his wife was preoccupied with learning from Lavinia Seymour how they should best occupy their time while in town. Anne was delighted to learn that Lavinia also had a son, who couldn’t wait to meet his first American.

The following morning Lavinia reappeared at the Savoy, accompanied by Stuart Seymour. After they had shaken hands, Stuart asked William, ‘Are you a cowboy?’

‘Only if you’re a redcoat,’ William immediately replied. The two six-year-old boys shook hands a second time.

That day, William, Stuart, Anne and Lady Seymour visited the Tower of London, and watched the Changing of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. William told Stuart that he thought everything was ‘swell’, except for Stuart’s accent, which he found difficult to understand.

‘Why don’t you talk like us?’ he demanded, and was surprised to be informed by his mother that the question should more properly be put the other way around, as ‘they’ had come first.

William enjoyed watching the soldiers in their bright red uniforms with large, shiny brass buttons who stood guard outside Buckingham Palace. He tried to talk to them, but they just stared past him into space and never seemed to blink.

‘Can we take one home?’ he asked his mother.

‘No, darling, they have to stay in London and guard the King.’

‘But he’s got so many of them. Can’t I have just one? He’d look just swell outside our house in Louisburg Square.’