Читать книгу A Child is Born - Charles Yale Harrison - Страница 6

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In St. Louis, a sharp-faced young man tacked a sign over a doorway.

He had been an orphan farm boy—a starved chore boy who cleaned out cuspidors in a small-town hotel; an itinerant shifting from town to town.

The money-making fever had just struck the Middle West, business men swaggered down the main streets smoking fat cigars and the young man looked at his sign over the door with pride. It read: Bernard Powers, Kinisitherapist, Teacher of Higher Physical Culture.

In 1868, a few months after a snarling Senate had decided by one favorable vote to keep the impeached President, Andrew Johnson, in office, the infant Powers was born to a young farmer’s sickly wife in a backwoods county in Missouri.

His father, son of a dilapidated country gentleman, felt that even in his poverty it was incumbent upon him to indulge himself in whisky and to follow the horse races at the visiting county fairs.

In an atmosphere of dismal domestic strife and in the misery of a two-room cabin fouled with the odor of the near-by pigsty, the puny Powers struggled through his first infant days.

Drunken sprees of his father ... memories of bitter quarrels ... the baffled bewilderment of children in the face of the hate between adults ... a warped background to carry through life ... a life that will later influence millions of Americans in a subtle, banal manner.

Like the badly drawn illustrations used on prohibition tracts of the period, the father comes to his drunken end ... “wild drunken sprees, terminating not long afterwards, in a death in the throes of delirium tremens.”

A childhood flush with strange impressions ... the Negro neighbors; the Baptist immersions in the river close at hand. The rich melancholy spirituals:

Jawdon water

Chilly col’:

Chill-a de body,

But not de soul!

The hysterical shrieks of the Negro women as they felt the cold water against blazing bodies ... the little Powers standing on the bank of a Missouri river receiving impressions—life-molding impressions.

In Chicago a doctor scrapes the skin of his arm and vaccinates the boy ... the frail lad cannot endure the strength of the serum ... he grows ill, his body becomes hot and sticky, his eyes luminous with fever.

“Add a new foe,” his biographer, a poet after a sort, wrote long years afterwards, “add a new foe for him to fight, along with drunkenness and fear....”

And then there was the poverty-driven mother with the worry of keeping her child moving from town to town planning to leave the little boy at a boys’ orphanage.

The scene on the Mississippi pier. A boat was drawn alongside waiting for the passengers to come aboard ... a big dark man comes and tears him away from his mother ... the mother’s frightened face ... the beating of a frightened heart ... “sobs racking the little body,” the hack biographer wrote, ... the smoke of the river-boat disappearing around the bend in the river....

The institution, the beatings, the huddled children at night in the dark dormitory ... impressions that will form a life which later will talk to scores of millions of Americans from newspapers, magazines, radio. Frightened, childhood days filled with fears.

At night when the new boy arrived, a little voice whispered to him from an adjacent bed, “They never feed us nuthin’. No boy ever grew any bigger while they kept him in this place.” ... Primitive emotions; the longing for food, for the quiet of a home, for ease from the pains of a fevered body.

The kind-hearted relatives who took him in to work in the small-town hotel near Chicago ... the cuspidor slops to be emptied ... the boots to be blackened ... the worn-out body at night ... the fat, grotesque wife of the hotel-owner, who frightened the lad as he sat and watched the Chicago train pull out of the country-town station, and then the words from her mouth later, “Yer ma’s dead....”

Then long afterwards as Powers sits in his large, sunny office on Broadway in New York he tells his interviewer: “Memories of her would come back, and I would continue cheerlessly at my work in the hotel, sobbing, sobbing....”

The writer repeats a verse and the publisher nods his head in approval as his long, bunched-up hair bobs up and down giving his smallish body a ludicrous appearance:

“Mother, come back from your echoless shore,

Take me again to your heart as of yore ...

Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,

With your light lashes just sweeping my face.

Never hereafter to wake or to sleep.

Rock me to sleep mother, rock me to sleep.”

In the crowded streets below newsboys sold a lurid pink newspaper which showed pictures of legs of publicity-avid chorus girls, which lonely men living in gray rooming-houses took home with them at night.

In the meantime, however, in St. Louis the eager young man, ex-laundry worker, hung out the kinisitherapist sign over the door.

The effects of the strangled childhood weigh on his brain ... money ... money ... money ... health ... strength ... half-formed ideas raced through his head ...

Words picked up out of books eagerly read in libraries.

Half-baked ideas being fashioned by the hysteria of an enormous frustration.

“The human body is the temple of God ... Bernard Powers kinisitherapist teacher of higher physical culture.... I am the rebuilder, I am the guardian of the temple of the living God ... I will be the apostle of physical culture in America ... I will be like the thundering bearded prophet of the Old Testament who will hurl bolts of denunciation at the erring, wine-bibbing, Baal-worshiping Americans and bring them back to a sane, healthy life....”

New York.

Obscure business ventures.

The thirty-year-old Powers dreamed at night of a magazine that would carry his message to millions of people.

Borrowing money, reading proofs ... and at last the publication saw the light of day.

The factories in the land were turning out pale-faced laborers, slums were spreading, the East Side in New York, the Red Hook section in Brooklyn; in Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, down by the waterfronts. New cities were springing up and with the factories came sickness, headaches, patent medicines and now the kinisitherapist’s magazine.

It gave a message to the twelve-hour-a-day factory workers.

It said: “Weakness is crime ... vigorous, pulsating health is within reach of all ... the human body is the temple of God ...”

Farmers’ wives buy the magazine in Iowa, Nebraska, Vermont.

“The body beautiful ... the temple of God....”

Pictures of posing athletes, male and female. The stacks of blue magazines mount higher on the news-stands in the land.

Later cheap sex stories, confession stories, sensational divorce cases are featured in the millions of magazines and newspapers which pour off his presses but now the bushy-haired kinisitherapist is engrossed in the temple of God....

The child within Margaret is nearing its hour of delivery. Life in Red Hook goes its sweltering way. Edward Roberts toils on the South Brooklyn docks. In his union Michael Doyle, the labor leader, reigns supreme. The little Roberts girls, Miriam and Gladys, play in the Red Hook streets, hide in cellars with the little street urchins, learn strange things, half-understanding.