Gorgeous Lies by Martha McPhee

Acclaimed by critics, Martha McPhee's debut Bright Angel Time established her as a dazzling new talent in American fiction; she fulfills her promise and breaks ambitious new ground with Gorgeous Lies. Charismatic therapist Anton Furey is dying, and the tribe he heads-his five children, his wife's three, and their uniting child, Alice-has returned to Chardin, the farm where they grew up and played out Anton's vision of communal living. They had been famous for being the new American blended family, their utopian lifestyle chronicled by film crews and reporters. But as Anton grows weaker, the hurts and betrayals of those years boil to the surface, and the children find themselves reliving the knotty intimacies they share as they struggle to make their peace with Anton. With shimmering prose and an acutely observant eye, McPhee has created a portrait of an era and a family that explores the limits, and obligations, of love. Editorial Reviews Review [McPhee]''s prose captures the Chardin mood: Elegant and airy, it seems to levitate even the grubbiest details. (Los Angeles Time Book Review) An unusually strong novel [that] explores the wild frontier of domestic life. (O Magazine) McPhee is a sensuous stylist. (Elle) It''s easy to see why the charismatic figures from BRIGHT ANGEL TIME would not loosen their grip on this author. (Washington Post Book World) Gorgeous Lies is a lovely meditation on mortality . . . Brilliantly and convincingly done. (Larry McMurtry) When McPhee strikes the right rhythm, you don''t so much read her prose as live inside it. (Santa Fe New Mexican) I loved this book. Martha McPhee plainly ranks as one of our country''s best young writers. (Tim O'Brien author of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED) McPhee brings sensitivity and insight to her account.... She is an immensely gifted novelist. (Albany Times-Union) Fine work: A moving portrait of a foolish, foul-hearted, but impossibly innocent man. (starred review Kirkus) Deftly depicts individuals dealing with old memories and new problems. (Dallas Morning News) About the Author Martha McPhee is the author of Bright Angel Time, a New York Times Notable book, and coauthor with Jenny and Laura McPhee of Girls. She teaches at Hofstra University and lives in New York City. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE Promise THEY LOVED ANTON. Every single one of them. Alice most of all. She was his youngest. Eve loved him. She was his wife. Agnes loved him. She was his ex-wife. Lily loved him. She was his lover. They all loved him. The little beady-eyed preacher woman, the woman who sold ducks, Eve's divorce lawyer who always had a different girl on his arm, the Strange couple from down the road. (That was their name, Strange, and they were strange, with dramatic drawn-out English accents, though they were not English-he a poet and a banker, she an aging actress.) The Furey kids loved him, of course. He was their father. The Cooper girls tried to hate him, but what they really wanted was for him to love them. Love them big and wide and infinitely, like a father. The Cooper girls were not his children. Once, they had all lived at Chardin-all the children, that is. Long ago in the 1970s. It was called Chardin for the Omega Point, and it was Anton's dream that he could create a home that was a perfect meeting place of the human and the divine: a divine milieu, the setting for a profound and mystical vision of God. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was his preferred philosopher. He upset the Catholic Church, scaring its thinkers into thinking about his attempt to combine evolutionary theory and Christian theology in a seamless whole. Chardin sprawled on a hill, the highest point in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, blessed with hundred-mile views and lapped by seas of green fields rolling into cornfields and forests with creeks slinking through them. And up there, there was a lot of sky with all its storms and sunshine. In the spring forsythia, magnolia, lilac, and dogwood bloomed. The house had been a hunter's cabin, added on to over the years by Anton and the architect so that wings extended from it, spokelike, sprouting glass rooms and lofts and decks. At one end of the house an indoor swimming pool steamed like the mouth of a dragon, so fiercely you could not see but an inch in front of you. Steam seeped through the cracks in the sliding doors so that that end of the house seemed alive. Anton, who was many things-a philosopher writing a treatise on love, a berry salesman, a dealer in Haitian art, a writer, a Gestalt therapist, a Texan-had wanted the indoor pool as a place to hold therapy sessions. The architect loved him. They had big dreams for what more they would do to Chardin. Dreams involving silos, Moorish courtyards, a barn, a tower on the barn, an office from which Anton could watch the setting sun. On the roof of this office he would gather all his children and friends to read poetry in the dimming light. I need a small pool. Big enough to fit twenty-five people or so and it needs to get pretty hot, Anton said to the architect upon first meeting him. Standing in the architect's living room, he also asked for a whiskey though it wasn't noon. Outside, Anton's turquoise Cadillac languished in the sun, filled with kids. Scotch, the architect said, because he only had scotch. Slim and handsome, with a quiet voice and a tendency to stroke his bearded chin, he was a precise man with a tidy mind and a tidy house, and in his world people did not drink before six. On Anton's ring finger the architect noticed an enormous turquoise ring. In his world, as well, men did not wear rings. His name was Laurence-pronounced the French way. Anton drank down the scotch and then ushered Laurence into the back of the Cadillac while all the kids crammed up front. Schoolbooks and boys' underwear were everywhere, and as Anton drove fast Laurence flopped this way, then that, picking the underwear off of him. A pool, Anton said, looking at Laurence in the rearview mirror, for my therapy sessions. I believe in finding ways to become un-self-conscious. And Laurence nodded and the kids carried on up front. Anton had one hand on the wheel, the other draped over the back of the seat. He piloted the car like a master, suave Texan that he was. The idea of un-self-consciousness floated like a party balloon in the back. Laurence hoped he'd get to this house alive. And he worried. He was a worrier. You could read it on his tightened face. I don't know, Laurence kept saying, distressed because an indoor pool was never as easy as it seemed, because his beautiful wife was having an affair, because he had four teenage boys and a floundering practice in a tidy little town. It'll be fine, Anton said into the rearview mirror-smooth Texas accent. And just the way he said it, just the way Anton held him with his eyes, made Laurence feel possibility. As if Anton's eyes opened up for him and allowed him a visit inside, the mix of enthusiasm and wickedness and faith therein beckoning Laurence, seducing Laurence-as if Anton's dreams, sliding off his lips like truth, were large enough to save him, too. They became fast friends with their elaborate visions for Chardin. Before too long Anton was inviting Laurence to rebirthing ceremonies on the front lawn in which a person ready for rebirth crawled naked through a canal of arching bodies, teaching Laurence one more aspect of un-self-consciousness. The steam from the pool caused the ivy to thrive. Ivy crept up the walls, nearly covering the house. It crept through some of the windows into some of the rooms, and though it looked beautiful, over the years it caused the walls to rot, the roof to leak, the pipes to crack. Its roots snaked underground and around the sewage pipes, cracking them, too, and on thick July days the faint smell of waste wafted over the yard. It'll be all right, Anton promised. He promised that many times over the years-when the waste backed up into the basement bathroom and overflowed onto the basement floor; when water dripped through the ceiling from the roof onto Julia's pink bedspread; when, indeed, the design for an indoor pool proved more difficult than originally thought and the wall between the pool and Jane's room turned to paste and crumbled. It'll be all right, he promised when they couldn't afford the taxes and the IRS threatened to foreclose on the house, when cops flew low over the cornfields in helicopters to determine if grass was growing there. Grass as in pot, dope, weed, reefer, marijuana. Anton and the kids grew it back then, in the 1970s, and the cops would fly in low to inspect the fields and Anton would shout to all the kids, The cops are coming! His beautiful, wicked grin lit up each one of them. They'd scramble out of the house, slithering into the fields to lay waste to the plants. The cops are coming, exhilaration in his voice and a thrill running through the kids because they knew that they would not get caught. It's just ditch weed anyway, one kid would say. The cops would come, would circle, that's true. The loud hum of the helicopters teasing the kids as they lay in the fields against the prickly husks and the corn silk. The wind from the helicopters blew over their backs. It'll be all right, Anton promised with all the authority of a Texas Ranger-his sideburns curling, his blue eyes squinting, his Texas accent full. He was six generations Texas on his mama's side. The first oil well in Texas blew at Spindletop on January 10, 1901, not far from the site of his great-great-granddaddy Beaumont's farm. Beaumont had been a French trapper, trapped alligators in the bayous and swamps. In 1824 he sold his land to other trappers and farmers and they made the town of Beaumont to honor him, and the town thrived, growing rich on rice and salt and soy and even blueberries and later crawfish from the Neches River before it became an oil mecca. If only Beaumont hadn't sold the land, Anton would tell the kids, as if great wealth and fortune were just within their grasp. His great-granddaddy was a journalist for the Corsicana Star and one of the few men in Texas who was pro-Union during the Civil War. One hundred and twenty thousand men wore the gray coats and fought for the Confederacy. Just two thousand supported the Union, and most of them were forced to leave the state. But John Darling stayed and made his opinions known. No one was going to throw him out of Texas. It's the rich man's war and the poor man's fight, he wrote as boys were drafted to fight while slave owners were not required to enlist. Anton's granddaddy was the first in their line to leave Texas. He drove off in a convertible Pierce Arrow with the top down all the way to Hollywood to become the pharmacist to the stars. He bought a movie mogul's mansion and lived his life out there, leaving behind his Catholic-convert wife to die of a female disease and his young daughter, Emma Darling, Anton's mama, to be raised by Ursuline nuns. For the remainder of Darling's life he longed for Texas. Of Texas Texans are proud. It remains in them, the essential ingredient of who they are. That's how it was for Anton, and for the Furey and Cooper kids. Texas became a mythic spot of identity and action, of high-stakes poker where little rich boys lost their daddy's Cadillacs in a game, a country of tall tales where people talked big and lived big and the laws of life elsewhere did not exist. On March 20, 1930, Anton was born in Corsicana; it was a cool spring morning, very early, very dark, and the air fragrant with first flowers. Winds from the east blew in quietly along with the Great Depression, and Bonnie and Clyde were on the road robbing banks, already capturing many imaginations. But the real significance of this day is that it would later be discovered to be the true birth date of Christ. At Chardin, on this occasion, there would be a celebration: champagne and waltzing and the Serape rug rolled back and toasts to Anton for sharing this with Christ, adding all the more to his power and allure. Anton, big large man that he was, loomed over all the kids-their leader, their guide. They loved him. Whatever the problem, he would say, We'll figure it out. Promise? the kids would ask. Promise like a ticket to somewhere fabulous, like an answer. Promise, rich beautiful word that it is. Promise. The oath of God to Abraham. That their futures wou...