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THADDEUS COHEN’S next quarterly report revealed that Abel Rosnovski had stopped buying or selling stock in any of Lester’s affiliated companies. It seemed he was now concentrating all his energies on building new hotels in Europe. Cohen’s opinion was that Rosnovski was lying low until a decision had been made by the SEC following its Interstate inquiry.

Representatives of the SEC had visited William at the bank on several occasions. He had spoken to them with complete frankness, but they never revealed how their inquiries were progressing, or suggested who was responsible for the share collapse. The SEC finally concluded its investigation and thanked William for his cooperation. He assumed he would have to wait a few months before they published their conclusions.

As the election grew nearer and Truman began to look more and more like a ‘lame duck’ president, William began to fear that Rosnovski might have got away with it. He couldn’t help feeling that Henry Osborne must have been able to pull a few strings in Congress, and remembered that Cohen had once underlined a note about a $50,000 donation from the Baron Group to Truman’s campaign fund. He was not surprised to read in Cohen’s latest report that Rosnovski had donated a further $50,000 to Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats’ candidate for President. But he was shocked when he discovered that he’d also given $50,000 to the Eisenhower campaign fund. Cohen had underlined the second figure.

William had never considered supporting anyone for public office who didn’t run on a Republican ticket. He wanted Eisenhower, the compromise candidate who had emerged on the first ballot at the convention in Chicago, to defeat Stevenson, even though a Republican administration was less likely to press for a share-manipulation inquiry.

When General Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected the 34th President of the United States on November 4, 1952 (it appeared that the nation did ‘like Ike’), William assumed that Rosnovski had escaped any charge. He only hoped that the experience would persuade him to leave Lester’s affairs well alone in the future.

The one small compensation to come out of the election for William was that Henry Osborne lost his congressional seat to a Republican. The Eisenhower jacket had turned out to have long coattails, and Osborne’s rival had clung to them. Thaddeus Cohen was inclined to think that Osborne would no longer exert quite the same influence over Abel Rosnovski now he was no longer in office. The rumour in Chicago was that since Osborne’s wealthy second wife had divorced him, he’d started gambling again, and was running up debts all over town. William was feeling more relaxed than he had for some time, and looked forward to the prosperous and peaceful era that Eisenhower promised in his Inauguration speech.

During the first months of the new President’s administration, William put Rosnovski’s threats to the back of his mind, assuming he’d learned his lesson. He told Thaddeus Cohen that he believed they’d heard the last of Abel Rosnovski. Cohen didn’t comment, but then he hadn’t been asked to.

William put all his efforts into building Lester’s, both in size and reputation, increasingly aware that he was now doing it as much for his son as for himself. Some of the younger board members at the bank had already started referring to him as the ‘old man’.

‘It had to happen,’ said Kate.

‘Then why hasn’t it happened to you?’ he asked gallantly.

Kate smiled. ‘Now I know how you’ve closed so many deals with vain men.’

William laughed. ‘And one beautiful woman.’

With Richard’s twenty-first birthday only a few months away, William revised the provision of his will. He set aside $5 million for Kate, $2 million for each of the girls, and left the rest of the family fortune to Richard, ruefully noting the bite that would be extracted for inheritance taxes, despite a Republican majority in both houses. He also left $1 million to Harvard.

Richard had been making good use of his time at Harvard. By the beginning of his senior year he not only appeared set for a summa cum laude, but he was also playing the cello in the university orchestra and was second pitcher for the baseball team. As Kate liked to ask rhetorically, how many students spend Saturday afternoon playing baseball against Yale, and Sunday evening playing the cello in the Lowell concert hall?

Richard’s final year passed all too quickly, and when he left Harvard armed with a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics, a cello and a baseball bat, all he required before reporting to the Business School on the other side of the Charles River was a good holiday. He flew off to Barbados with a girl named Mary Bigelow, of whose existence his parents were blissfully unaware. Miss Bigelow had studied music, among other things, at Vassar, and when they returned two months later, Richard took her home to meet his parents. William approved of Miss Bigelow; after all, she was Alan Lloyd’s great-niece.

Richard began his graduate course at Harvard Business School on October 1, 1954, after taking up residence in the Red House. The first thing he did was to throw out all his father’s cane furniture and to remove the paisley wallpaper that Matthew Lester had once thought so fashionable. His grandfather’s winged leather chair survived. He installed a television in the living room, an oak table in the dining room, a dishwasher in the kitchen and, more than occasionally, Miss Bigelow in the bedroom.