My Old Kentucky Home

MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME By Elliot . Paul Random Home New York To MARY RUTH MCCARTHY Contents PAGE 1. A Gay Woman in Deep Mourning 3 2. An Uncle in the Attic 13 3. Two Bachelors from Boston 25 4. One of My Best Friends 42 5. The Coal Bin 56 6. Something Borrowed, Something Blue 68 7. The Doe at Bay 76 8. A First-Class Disorderly House 91 9. Souls Lost and Found 105 10. Beyond the Borderlines 122 11. The Shadow World 145 12. The Haunted Palace 166 13. Love, Honor and Obedience 185 14. An Apology for Purity 197 15. The Louisville Superiors 204 16. The Zodiac 222 17. The Smells of Yesteryear 244 18. A Verse from Alexander Pope 255 19. The Olney Handicap 269 20. Electrical Psychology 281 21. A Good Deed in a Naughty World 294 22. Springs Awakening 320 23. Some Country People 336 24. Patterns 350 25. A Sentimental Journey 359 26. The Insects That Burn in the Spring, Tra La 368 27. A Painted Horse and a Golden Ring 377 Contents PAGE 28. O Oratory and Entertainment 381 29. Apropos the Mystic Shrine 392 30. The Hot Sands 414 31. A Fabric Fades 425 Vlll MY OLD KENTUCKY HOME CHAPTER ONE A Gay Woman in Deep Mourning 1HERE are many sweet songs about the South and singers who long to be there, in dear old Georgia, Old Virginny, and the fields of cotton, under the magnolias, with Nellie Gray and Sweet Hallie, and none has a more poignant appeal than My Old Kentucky Home. But most of those who yearn for Dixie are thinking of times gone by, and cannot be trans ported there on a strictly physical basis, since, in these states, towns and cities and countrysides vanish within a few short years fyeneath an accumulation of outsiders and junk, are crusted over with discarded layers of progress, extend toungainly limits, and cease to resemble themselves. Louisville, before the World Wars, was one of the most charming and carefree communities, north or south, in this couiatry or abroad. Today anyone may fly there in a few hours, T hat will be found in that graceful bend but of the Ohio Rive Dixc 1909 whici enter just below the imaginary extension of the Mason n line, is grotesquely different from the Louisville of and 1910, the first city in which I lived and worked and i offered me its rare and diverse aspects to explore. To that city again, at the age of eighteen, I have to close my eyes ai id let extraneous and intervening thoughts drift from my miiVd. The ctity called the Gateway of the South, that nurtured Auduboi p., Daniel Boone, Marse Henry and the late Justice 3 My Old Kentucky Home Brandeis, of loo-proof straight Kentucky whiskey aged in the wood and bottled in bond, of mighty fine tobacco, Churchill Downs, Mrs. Wiggs and her cabbage patch, bluegrass seed by the sack, the home of chewing gum and a famous baseball bat, more often than not comes back to me in the form of a noc turne. That is because I, like most other young Americans without independent means, had a job at which I was sup posed to be busy from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, with Saturday afternoons, Sundays and a few holi days off, for good behavior. Our personal lives, therefore, when we were relatively young, began before twilight and continued as long as we could stay awake. My beloved Old Kentucky Home was not a rural cottage but a three-story brick boarding house on West Chestnut Street, and since Donna Guillermina, a fellow-boaxder, was largely instrumental in establishing me there, mymemories of Louisville are likely to evoke her presence and personality. We were both strangers to the region, when we met on the south-bound train from Washington, D. C. In any corfipany, she was unique, and more or less conspicuous. During my first few months in Louisville, on Sunday after noons I would tap on the door of Donna Guillerminas rioom, 4 the spacious second-floor front she shared with her daughter, Adela, and would wait, sometimes fifteen minutes, somet imes an hour or more, while she finished her toilette...