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4.5
When Brenda Gilchrist is entertained on a houseboat in Kashmir in 1956, dining on pomegranate lamb and saffron tripe garnished with tulips, served with a bow (i.e., salaam), the sumptuous feast puts her in mind of a different kind of cook Down East: the unceremonious Blanche, dishing up fish at her family's ancestral home on Deer Isle. Another feeding ritual, pitching cherry tomatoes to Bracey, her Welsh corgi, triggers memories of tossing boyfriends about nonchalantly in decades past. These mnemonic cues, along with recollected conversational snippets as told to Bracey, work superbly to flash back and forward in time. The prose is an artful blending of incisive strokes, fine-tuned sensory impressions, with sfumato passages shading into mystery in places. Left to wonder, we are ever more absorbed in the fascinations of these lyrical vignettes. Photographs of the author with her family and friends bring into sharp or soft focus the vicarious experiences of traveling with her to exotic places, as well as dropping in on the domestic Maine setting that was first a childhood retreat, now her year-round homestead. Pictures of some loom larger than others, especially those of the title character, Bracey, named for the distaff side of her family, the Braces, whose pedigree is no less impressive than the eponymous corgi's bloodline. Anyone who has lived with a fur person (May Sarton's term) will know how much is gained by engaging the companion animal in conversation, deepening the bonds of devotion, empathy, intuitive knowledge. It's ennobling all around -- and insightful for us, the readers, to know what Gilchrist is thinking through the interspecies communication she shares in the incidents related here. We understand too how putting him down on paper, recording Bracey's death, completes a circle. He's "deep in shady stillness now, ... silent as a stone" (my own gleaning from Keats, Hyperion), but this memoir, taking the measure of his sweet spirit, is a counterweight to the heavy sadness experienced in losing him. "For every thing there is a season," an ancient sage declared (Ecclesiastes 3:5), this being "a time to gather stones," to piece together elements that restore a whole. Parts into patterns. Patterns conjoined and framed. A constructive exercise. And what a rich mosaic it is, appealing variously to lovers of music and art, of living landscapes and animated (if not dancing) house pets. The chapter titles are pure poetry, inveigling us into the narrative to discern the kernels of meaning they hold. "Telltales," for example, is about living large, having fun, but also about paying close attention, staying on course, as a mariner watches telltales on the stays. Though an accomplished sailor, the author has reason to be risk averse at certain junctures, to fear entrapment. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," Emily Dickinson writes, and it's that kind of truth Gilchrist imparts about domestic and romantic attachments in her sketches -- oblique, nuanced, and with a singer's keen ear for chords and cadences. "Patterns in Ice" recounts resentment toward a mother who withholds affection and approval. At age eight Gilchrist is left at a boardinghouse in the Swiss Alps and, infuriated, defies her mother's dictates -- to ski and speak French -- choosing instead to skate in frenzied figure eights. A haunting photograph of her mother in formal evening dress, emanating "sensuous confidence," gazes out from these pages. And who are "The Dangerous Classes" chronicled by Charles Loring Brace, Gilchrist's great-grandfather, in the 1870s? Read chapter two and see what he and others in his illustrious clan have contributed to the history of social reform and literature. The author says cryptically that she considers herself more Gilchrist than Brace, yet she tells us nothing about her father's lineage. Clues are dropped as to reasons, but it would seem that Dickinson has the most telling line: "Success in Circuit lies." In any case, on the evidence of this book, Brenda Gilchrist has done them all proud. I can picture them applauding with brio the magnificent storytelling abilities of their daughter, who is as self-effacing about her own talent, by the way, as she is when describing the accomplishments of her eminent forebears. What matters, in the end, is that despite some challenging formative influences, she has sailed through privilege and penury (of a sort) to anchor on a bridged island off the Blue Hill peninsula. From her vantage point on Eggemoggin Reach, the purplescent Camden Hills in the distance, she revels in tableaux that might have been painted by the likes of Fitz Henry Lane, Martin Johnson Heade, and Winslow Homer. She's here to stay in "Lavender Bay," em-braced by the kindred-spirited community, her mooring secure, and we are the richer for it.Jody Spear
