There Was a Young Lady of Perth

I SOLD the first issue of Liberty magazine. In it was the beginning of the memoirs of George M. Cohan, and a limerick contest, for which the first prize was an enormous sum of money. Was it five thousand dollars, fifty thousand, or five hundred thousand? In any case, it was enough to make me stop and think about there having been a young lady of Perth.

Now, of course, I’m not unaware that most people don’t remember the first issue of Liberty magazine, if in fact they remember the second. How could they? The magazine saw the light of day when I was not much more than eleven or twelve, or thirteen or fourteen.

Did I sell it, or did I buy it? Did I make a profit of two and a half cents, or did I throw away a nickel? Memory fails me, and while it’s not as bad as if a bank had failed me, it’s bad enough, because I deal in memory. And when memory fails me, I’m in trouble. I have either got to invent, or I have got to do research.

I can invent fair to middling, feeling an awful liar all the while, but I can’t do research worth a bottle cap. I forget what I’m looking for and wind up with six or seven other things that I can’t use. I don’t mind inventing if there is a little aesthetic truth in it, as we say in the profession — “versimilitude,” I once heard one writer say, but I can’t vouch for either the spelling or the aptness. Verysimilar would have to be the words I would use, because I can spell those words and believe I know what they mean.

George M. Cohan happened to be a man I admired even more than I admired Benjamin Franklin, who was quite simply one of the truly great cutups in my life, as of course (later on, and in a different way) George M. Cohan was. I knew Ben had put up a kite and taken a chance on electrocution in order to invent electricity, and I knew he had written a boy’s story called The Autobiography of, but the thing I liked about him was his easygoing way of getting to be a great man. Finally, they sent him to Paris as the ambassador, and he enchanted the French, in their own words.

And so, in that first issue of Liberty magazine I was eager to find out how George M. Cohan had begun his life, because George, the Yankee Doodle Dandy, was still alive and kicking. I thought it would be interesting to find out his secret of success, in case someday our paths were to cross. There was no such chance with Ben Franklin, of course.

Was the year 1924? If so, Ben had been dead for some time, and George M. was surely not much more than thirty. Or might it have been forty? Thirty or forty, he was certainly at the height of his fame, writing plays, singing, dancing, and being an all-round American Boy, born on Independence Day. They made a movie about him, but I presumed they had done it for money, so I never saw it.

The world was different then, whether it was 1924, or a couple of years earlier, or a couple later. It was just plain different. It wasn’t necessarily better, and in all probability it was worse, but an American Boy had a chance in those days, on his own, unsponsored, so to say. All he needed was willingness, wit, and vitality, and so it was great to be an American, to be under voting age, to be unknown, to have the challenge there night and day, still unmet.

Liberty magazine had a fine editorial policy, although I have forgotten precisely what it was. In the name of something, somebody meant to be an American Boy, and to make money. I envied him, although l didn’t know his name. He was back of the whole thing, though, and the arrival of his magazine into my life was an event of some importance.

After work, I examined the magazine from cover to cover to find out what it came to, and then I read George M. Cohan’s contribution, which I found fascinating, because he was swift, confident, and talented. He was born backstage, and as soon as he could walk he went out and wowed ‘em, singing, dancing, and telling jokes.

The photographs of George and his beautiful sister and his handsome father and mother were an inspiration, but in those days the theater wasn’t my line, and so if I was to get started in the business of making my fame and fortune, out of the pages of Liberty magazine, it would have to be by winning the limerick contest, by making something out of the fact that, there was a young lady of Perth, if in fact that was what it was, as it probably wasn’t, although it was certainly the equivalent of it.

The trouble was I didn’t know anything about limericks, but Liberty magazine gave a brief history of them, how they had originated in a place called Limerick, and the magazine also gave three or four illustrations of perfect ones. These were incredibly clever, apt, wise, and witty. Somebody from somewhere tried to do something and as a result something unexpected happened. In a way, that was a little like the story of my life up to that time, and now it was time for a change. Instead of being the subject of a limerick, I wanted to be a writer of one, I wanted to be the writer of the greatest limerick of all time, because that would mean that I would win the contest, I would win the money, and people would say, “There goes the American Boy who wrote the limerick.”

I couldn’t think of a second line, though. There was a young lady of Perth; who she was or what she was up to, I couldn’t guess.

I kept it in mind, though. I had the first line, supplied by the magazine, and all I needed next was a second line that was so extraordinary that the rest of the lines of the limerick would fall into place and sound like perfection itself. The words that rhymed with Perth were “worth,” “mirth,” “birth,” “dearth,” “girth,” and, of course, “earth” — all good usable words. There was an earth, there was a birth, there were mirth and worth and the others, and so all I really needed to do was rattle them together and throw them out like dice, for a natural. With my conscious mind, the mind that was supposed to be equal to such a challenge, equal to thought, I had little luck. “There was a young lady of Perth who didn’t know what she was worth,” for instance, just wasn’t right.

And so I slept on it, or, to be a little more exact, it slept on me. The young lady of Perth was here, there, and everywhere, but the limerick remained incomplete, and l woke up in the morning knowing I had been in a fight and hadn’t won.

THAT first issue of Liberty magazine passed from me to ray brother, who also took an interest in the limerick contest, and then to my sisters, so that before the second issue of the magazine came out everybody in my family was at work trying to win fame and fortune as a limerick writer. We weren’t good at it, though. I don’t know who fell out first, but I know it wasn’t me. I think it was my brother, who tended to be cynical about contests in general, and about theories of how easy it is to rise in the world. He said it just wasn’t an overnight proposition. A man of thirteen, he believed, was a little less likely to be invited to Washington to discuss educational reform with President Harding than a man of sixteen, for instance. But a man of sixteen was less likely than a man of nineteen, and our neighborhood was pretty well stocked with nineteen-year-old American Boys who knew a thing or two about educational reform — throw out teachers who had remained stupid after considerable schooling. That was the basic educational reform principle of the neighborhood.

I noticed with regret my brother’s scorn for the limerick-writing contest, and I made up my mind to be different. I made up my mind to have stickto-itiveness, because I had heard that everybody who had ever amounted to anything had had stickto-itiveness. I reasoned that if they had had it, and had needed it, and had won through to success on account of it, I was going to have it, too. Every evening when I got home from work I checked with the other contestants, only to discover, after two or three such checks, that everybody had given up. I also discovered that my persistence, or stick-to-itiveness, was being taken for a nuisance.

Somebody said, “To hell with the young lady of Perth. This is Fresno.”

This amounted to nothing better than the waving of the white flag, surrender, armistice, failure, humiliation. I was flabbergasted and more determined than ever to win the contest.

There was time, the deadline was still ten or eleven days off, and I felt confident that long before the required midnight postmark of the final day I would have my limerick neatly written and on its way to Liberty magazine in — wherever it was. I don’t believe it was in New York, or in Chicago, either. I just don’t remember where it was, but it was somewhere, and this place could be reached by train mail in a matter of six or seven days. There was no airmail in those days.

One afternoon the chain on my bike broke while I was sprinting, and I was sent over the handle bars onto the pavement. Something was always happening to my bike. It wasn’t holding up, but nobody ever said, “They don’t make them the way they used to.” The wire spokes of the wheel were always loosening, and while I had a spoke tightener, as every practical-minded messenger had, whenever I tightened a couple of loose spokes I noticed that the alignment of the wheel became unbalanced. You had to be an expert even in a thing like that.

The dive was on my head, which was at least a little protected by the blue cap of Postal Telegraph, or at any rate would have been had the cap not fallen off just before my head struck the pavement, when I needed it most.

It was quite a jolt, but, as always, I hoped there had been no witnesses, for I despised having accidents, and I resented help and sympathy.

The minute my head hit the pavement the whole winning limerick came to me, and I was stunned by the brilliance and rightness of it. the simplicity and inevitability of it, and by the fact that it had taken a foolish accident to bring the thing around. I was all set to begin committing it to memory before I forgot it when an elderly lady of Fresno hurried up and asked, as a mother or a grandmother might, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, ma’am, it’s nothing, thank you.” All quickly said, so she would be satisfied and move along, but no, she wanted to chat.

“Are you sure? Here, let me help you up.”

Well, then I realized I was still flat on my back, so I leaped to my feet, picked up the fallen bike, and began to unwheel the chain, which had become entangled around the hub.

There was no getting away from her, or rather no getting her away from me. On and on she chatted, and of course my upbringing compelled me to answer every question respectfully.

At last I was able to walk away with my bike. It was time to commit the limerick to memory, but all I could remember was the first line again. The thing was lost.

I WAS still so mad that evening when I got home that my brother couldn’t help noticing.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Lousy chain broke again.”

I didn’t want to tell him about the limerick because I was afraid he wouldn’t believe me, and a younger brother hates not being believed. I’d had that whole limerick right after I had dived, and it was the winning one. too. I’d had it, and then that nice old lady of Fresno had come up and had made me forget it. My brother examined my head and told me there was a bump there. I told him I knew there was a bump there. He wasn’t really satisfied with my reason for being mad, and little by little he won me over to a full confession. I was astonished that he didn’t disbelieve me. On the contrary, he was sure that I had had the winning limerick and had lost it.

“The thing to do,” he said, “is to get it back.”

“How?”

“The same way.”

“Sprint and break the chain and dive on my head? Nothing doing.”

“That’s how it came to you. That’s how you’ll get it back. If you want something badly enough, you’ve got to pay the price for it.”

“It was an accident,” I said. “I’m not going to have an accident on purpose. I don’t think it’s possible in the first place, and even if it were, even if I had another accident, how do I know what kind of limerick I’d get out of it? It might not be the winner at all.”

“Suit yourself.” my brother said.

Now, it never occurred to ine that he was having fun, and I kept thinking about his suggestion. Alter supper we went out to the back yard, where our wheels were. I looked at mine, with the chain as good as new again, repaired by Frank the Portuguese bike man, from whom we had bought our bikes, secondhand, and after a moment I got on the bike real slow and easy and rode out across the empty lot adjoining our back yard, and then out onto the sidewalk of San Benito Avenue, and then out onto the pavement of M Street, and there I began to sprint. My brother came running after me, shouting, “For God’s sake, I was only kidding, don’t do it, you’ll kill yourself.”

Well, the fact is i really hadn’t meant to do it, I had only meant to sprint, racing, going as fast as I could go, as a kind of test of the fates. The chain was strong, and it just wasn’t likely to break — unless the fates wanted me to take another dive, get back the winning limerick, and be on my way to fame and fortune. I heard my brother. The memory of what it was I had a lot of—stick-toitiveness — came back to me, and I decided I would do my best to make that repaired chain snap and break, after all. I raced three blocks to Ventura Avenue without luck; the chain was as strong as ever. My brother rode up on his wheel and said, “Now, look, if you really think that that’s the way to get the lost limerick back, I’ll do everything I can to help you.”

“How?”

“I’ll hold you about two feet above the pavement — that’s enough — and drop you. It’s safer that way.”

We were riding back on M Street in any case, so we rode on up to the Rainier Brewery, a kind of Bavarian red-brick castle entangled in railroad tracks and company roads, and we rode around the brewery, closed now, finished for the day, and we discussed the problem. After a while we dismounted and sat on the steps of the brewery to discuss procedure a little further and to make sure that nobody was around. The coast was clear and procedure had been agreed upon, when Eddie Imirian and Johnny Suni came up, bouncing an old tennis ball. My brother and I were challenged to a game of handball against the brewery wall. We won 21 to 18, and then it was dark, but Eddie and Johnny wanted another game, so we played in the dark and won 21 to 12.

When we reached our house, the boys sat with us on our front porch steps and talked about school. It looked as if they never wanted to go home, but finally they did, and my brother said, “Well, how about it?”

“The tar on San Benito Avenue isn’t hard enough,” I said.

“Want to try the sidewalk?”

“It’s harder than the pavement I hit.”

“Whatever you say.”

Well, we were both pretty tired, but it seemed to me this was a matter of stick-to-itiveness if I ever saw one, so I quickly said, “Let’s try her.”

My brother was holding me around the knees, about two feet over the sidewalk, and was all set to drop me on my head when my mother came out on the front porch with a pitcher of tahn on a tray. “Oh-oh,” my brother said.

Well, it was now or never, so I said, “Let go.”

Now, I was all set to get back the winning limerick, but my brother didn’t let go.

“Why are you holding your brother that way?” my mother said.

“Just exercise,” my brother said. “We take turns.”

He let me down, and I took him around the knees and held him precisely as he had held me. For a moment I thought of dropping him, without plan, but I thought better of it and didn’t.

“Come and drink tahn,” my mother said.

I let him down and we went up onto the porch and drank two big glasses each of the best drink in the world. Put two cups of yogurt in a pitcher, add four or five cups of cold water, stir, and drink.

Well, the drink was great, because it helped you to know how alive you were, and what a privilege it was.

One of my sisters began to play Dardanella on the piano, and the other began to sing. My brother and 1 listened and looked around at where we were, and then up at the sky, full of stars. It was kind of silly, in a way, living in a house like that, nothing to it really, a few boards and a little wallpaper, and us, in a whole neighborhood like that, but what could you do? The tahn was great. The air was full of something that made you know you were alive, and the sky seemed a lot like something almost as good as money in the bank.

Pretty soon my sisters came out on the porch. We all sat around and talked and told jokes and laughed. I liked it, but I kept feeling I was losing my stick-to-itiveness, and that was the one thing I couldn’t afford to lose. After about an hour we went inside to close up for the night.

My brother dropped me headfirst onto my bed, but all I did was bounce. The winning limerick didn’t come back. And then I dropped him, and all he did was bounce.

I did my best with my conscious mind, and sent in a limerick, and lost.

I read every installment of George M. Cohan’s life, and 1 envied him. I read the winning limerick, too. It didn’t come to very much.

About forty years later I reached Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia, It seemed like a nice place, something like Fresno, I saw the young lady of Perth in person. I saw her six or seven hundred times, as a matter of fact. I spoke to her six or seven times. She replied in a nice Australian accent. There was nothing suitable for a limerick in her.

She was just a nice girl.

In 1939 I met George M. Cohan in the offices of a theater in New York. He was a gentle, kindly fellow with a touch of sorrow in his eyes.

Liberty magazine changed hands a couple of times, and then gave up the ghost.

I forgot all about limericks. Also, stick-toitiveness.

I decided that don’t-stick-to-itiveness is a pretty usable philosophy, too, especially for a writer.