Read Kane & Abel (1979) for Free Online

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