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decade in the new station wagon, off to the camping site, the beach, the weekend, with the dog and the cat, the summer house and the camera.
    An ineffable femininity, tidal. Mortification in the face of these oceanic rhythms was the unspoken, perhaps unconscious, lot of the children who expressed it in their passionate love for their kind, happy mother and in a singularly low birthrate for themselves.
    Flaubert wrote in a letter to Louise Colet that he could never see a cradle without thinking of a grave.
    During the joy of New York I was still for many years drawn back home. Christmas visits down to Lexington, carried in the womb of the George Washington Pullman cars on the old C&O. I—wearing a putative mink from the Ritz Thrift Shop on 57th Street. The train passed through mining towns in West Virginia, down through Ashland, Kentucky, through Olive Hill and Morehead. A stinging, empty, country stillness along the way, the hills rising up on either side to cradle the train as it slipped through the valley. Square, leaning cabins, clinging like mountain goats; ribbons of wood smoke drifting in the mist. Trail of the Lonesome Pine, Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come, the disreputable, whining vowels and diphthongs of the mountain people.
    Once back home, my thought was: Do not speak to me of horses, of the Kentucky Derby. In school I remember that an unlikely radical in the Agricultural College did a study which seemed to prove that the costly offspring of thoroughbreds, auctioned off each year, did not bring in any more money, win more races, than the geniuses from the lower horse classes—those blessed mathematicians whose fathers ran candy stores. The joys of the Enlightenment.
    Still I remember the old race track, before Keeneland was built, before the barns burned and the horses screamed all night in their prisons. A pastoral quality then, something theatrical and marginal, like the coming of the circus. The lustrous afternoons, faded blue paled by sunlight, the soft May air. The tracks at dawn, the early sun, the tranquil curve of the empty grandstands.
    Near the end of the afternoon the important race is finally run. The purity of the dawn is forgotten. The dogwood and the lilac droop in the chill. And then the stress of the race, the pain and the pleasure of the outrageous effort are finally consecrated in a few moments. The sacrificial power of the horse and its Faustian contract with the jockey—something can be learned from that. A tristesse falls down upon the scene, down on the old memory. The horses are led away to their rest, their feelings about the race they have run unknown to us.
    Perhaps it is true that being from where I am I was born a gambler. And as the gambler in Dostoevsky’s great story says: It is true that only one out of a hundred wins, but what is that to me?

PART THREE
    “T HE UNSPEAKABLE vices of Mecca are a scandal to all Islam and a constant source of wonder to pious pilgrims.”
    For the pilgrim to Mecca the life of the city trembled with its dangerous salvations.
    1940’s
    New York: there I lived at the Hotel Schuyler on West 45th Street, lived with a red-cheeked, homosexual young man from Kentucky. We had known each other all our lives. Our friendship was a violent one and we were as obsessive, critical, jealous, and cruel as any ordinary couple. The rages, the slamming doors, the silences, the dissembling. Each was for the other a treasured object of gossip and complaint. In spite of his inclinations, the drama was of man and woman, a genetic dissonance so like the marital howlings one could hear floating up from the courtyard or creeping up and down the rusty fire escapes.
    The sharing of premises, premises laid out in these hotels with a brilliant economy that could make of strangers a mock family and turn a family into strangers. This sharing was all “living together” meant between us. And yet the grating friendship flowered in the morning and withered at night, shriveled in