Read Online The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel by Ted Thompson - Free Book Online

himself riding the train north on Saturdays and nodding along with Helene as she marveled at the charm of all those old houses.
    The house they chose was more than charming; it was, as the agent described it, historic. The floorboards were milled by hand and as old as the nation itself. Though the rooms were dim and cozy, the master bedroom had been renovated with higher ceilings and a pair of walk-in closets, so that while the outside retained a tight box of Protestant restraint, the inside had racks for all four seasons of shoes. As the three of them toured the rooms, Helene repeated each of the agent’s selling points to Anders as though he weren’t standing right there and hearing them himself, and when they were left alone in the bedroom to confer, she launched into a cartwheel before he could say a thing.
    After they closed, a graphite-sketched weekday in January, the agent dropped them off at their new home, which was dark and echoey and empty, and they tiptoed through the rooms in silence. By then, the Athena deal had become the model for thirty others just like it—it was a wild, unprecedented success—and Springer had beaten the charge into an industry that a year before had been left for dead. Walking through those rooms in the dying winter light, rooms that were nothing but dust and shadow and Helene and Anders’s own projections—of children and holidays, of a nest of warmth and safety—it occurred to him how stupid he’d been to doubt this. All his life he’d been resisting what was expected of him, a habit of reaction followed by a battery of justification. But what was in front of him, in this case his pregnant wife and their empty Georgian colonial, was all that he could ever want.
    His sons were born and his father died, replacing the battles of the past with a steady march of paychecks and workweeks, of predawn mornings and pitch-black evenings and stacks of shirts in cardboard boxes. It was a rush to get to the train and a rush to get home; a rush to get into a market and a rush to get out; there were risks in everything, gains and losses in a day’s transactions in sums that no man could recoup in his entire working life. There were good days and bad, good hours and bad, a responsibility to shareholders and to senior management, to investors and his own family, a ticking clock of quarterly earnings and an expectation from everyone, especially himself, that he would plunge headlong into the roiling seas of the global economy and come back each time a winner.
    He’d taken an interest in the credit market, avoiding the junk and the trends and focusing on dusty old bonds that no one ever noticed. It was a quiet market, a string quartet in the midst of the blaring boom boxes of leveraged buyouts, and its stability seemed a failure when everyone around him was getting filthy rich. He created no overnight billionaires and no overnight bankruptcies, and only the codgers on the board who had survived the Depression respected him. Brad French, however, barked at him to get out of the little girls’ room, to go big or go home, so he did that too, engineering the buyout of an outfit called Renfro-Pacific, an undervalued paper company that was transitioning from typewriters and shredders to “business solutions,” the burgeoning world of financial software that would later be conquered by Bloomberg. And though the deal was a windfall for Springer and again made Anders a darling, it also gave him a belly of stress weight and a susceptibility to relentless bloody noses. He made a habit of riding home in the bar car and mauling a can of beer nuts and then falling asleep before dinner. He spent his weekends battling weeds and doing violence to a hedge of English laurel, working himself into a heap of grassy sweat and then collapsing on the sofa with an aggravated back. At night, he could barely sleep and found solace in bags of chips fried in hydrogenated oils until, when he was thirty-seven, his heart