Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  On January 23, 1897, all Arena property was sold at public auction, and the book plates were sold for scrap. Gardener alone retained her book plates and unsold books.9 As Arena employees, Smart and Gardener filed claims for unpaid compensation totaling $406.20 and $1,384.60, respectively. The court decreed that employees would receive an amount not exceeding $100 each, meaning the couple lost over $1,500 (the equivalent of $45,000 today).10

  Then, on February 17, Smart and B. O. Flower were arrested for selling $2,700 of worthless stock to H. D. Campbell and Co. of Lynn, Massachusetts. The two men were held in jail until friends arrived to pay their $3,000 bail.11 Imagine Gardener’s shock at receiving word of Smart’s arrest the very day she had given a stirring speech in Washington about women’s right to live as independent humans. After all the years of watching him struggle at Equitable Life, she had tried so hard to arrange for Smart a job that he could do, no doubt using her own reputation as a chit, only for him to preside over The Arena’s bankruptcy and then get arrested for fraud.

  Over time, Gardener placed blame for the magazine’s demise and financial improprieties on B. O. Flower, whom she later described as a man “who stands by nothing . . . who for personal gain will throw away person or idea, who borrows money knowing” that he could never return it. She considered Flower to be “corrupt at the foundation.” Nevertheless, she was floored by The Arena’s collapse. The Arena incident “hurt me,” she reflected. “It hurt my capacity to do good work.”12

  By late March, Smart and Flower were “honorably discharged” of the accusations.13 But the damage had been done. The fifty-eight-year-old Smart would never work again. Gardener received an invitation to headline the fourth annual Pacific Woman’s Congress at the end of April. Papers reported that the California women had raised over $600, far above the norm and more than $18,000 today, to sponsor Gardener’s first trip to the West Coast because they believed she would “undoubtedly create more of a sensation than any other woman lecturer who has recently visited San Francisco.”14 The couple hastily put their belongings in storage in New York. On April 12, Smart rented his own storage trunk, in secret, from the Garfield Safe Deposit Company.15 Shortly thereafter, they took the new express train from New York to San Francisco, which, in a miracle of industrialism and ingenuity, took only three and a half days. The couple arrived in San Francisco on April 25, where the mayor welcomed the “bright particular star” at her hotel.16 Gardener told reporters that she and Smart had traveled to California for a much needed rest, planned to stay several months, and had “no definite plans for the immediate future.”17

  IF PINK CARNATIONS could pay for clothes, food, and hotel rooms, Gardener would have been rich. After she shared her favorite flower with a reporter, loyal readers and enthusiastic hosts regularly sent her flowers and gifts.18 As it was, carnations could not be traded for food or lodging, calling into question how Gardener and Smart financed their extended stay in California. Gardener’s friend Mary Phillips suspected that Smart had a secret stash of money, but Gardener doubted this—he could barely keep a job, how could he have harbored cash?19 Gardener published essays at a brisk pace throughout 1895 and 1896, and she told her California hosts that she regularly received $100 per talk.20 Whether or not this was her rate on the East Coast, her West Coast friends readily acceded. Needless to say, while in California, Gardener scheduled many talks.

  Her speaking tour began on Thursday, April 29, when she delivered the Woman’s Congress keynote address, reprising “The Moral Responsibility of Woman in Heredity,” a talk she had first presented at the 1893 world’s fair. Preconference publicity touted her “pronounced convictions and courage,” promising that Gardener, now forty-four, was “not yet middle-aged” and “decidedly pleasant to look at.” The San Francisco Call reported that “long before the hour of opening the street was crowded with an impatient throng anxious to secure the best possible seats.”21 From there, she and Smart traveled to Palo Alto so that Gardener could deliver an address on heredity at Stanford University, where she was introduced by Stanford president David Starr Jordan.22

  After two days at Stanford, they returned to San Francisco for Gardener to read from An Unofficial Patriot at a benefit for the Woman’s Congress held at Golden Gate Hall. Newspapers reported scant attendance at this event, but one notable audience member listened eagerly: army colonel Selden A. Day.23 Colonel Day’s wife had attended the first Pacific Coast Woman’s Congress in 1894 but died in 1895.24 Perhaps Day had befriended the organizers and continued attending the annual event or perhaps he came just to see Helen Hamilton Gardener, whose father reporters claimed he had known during his Civil War service in Virginia. In a remarkable coincidence, Day may also have heard about Gardener from his old comrade in the Ohio 7th Infantry: Isaac Mack, the editor of the Sandusky Daily Register and the man who broke the story of her affair back in 1876.

  Whatever the impetus, Day arrived at Gardener’s reading on May 7, 1897, ready to participate. After Gardener, dressed in “cream colored something and lace,” read from her book, Charles Smart piped up to tell the audience that the novel was a true story, based on Gardener’s father. Then, according to news reports, Day, “who as a youngster served in West Virginia during the war, told in a few words the dangers and difficulties of the expeditions through the rugged mountain passes and of the value to the Army of intelligent, competent, and patriotic guides.”25 The historical record does not reveal whether Day and Gardener socialized after her talk, but something between them surely transpired. The two remained in touch after her California trip.

  Gardener delivered a couple more lectures in San Francisco, traveled to Stockton to address another Woman’s Congress, and returned to the city to visit with friends.26 Meanwhile, in Boston, her nephew Bernard—the nefarious inspiration for the lead character in Is This Your Son, My Lord?—died, just shy of thirty-two.27 Remarkably, her last surviving sibling, Kate Chenoweth Roehl, died on the very same day.28 For as much as Gardener prized her status as a Chenoweth of Virginia, she was now the only remaining Chenoweth sibling.

  By July, Smart and Gardener were in Southern California, staying at swank hotels—the Van Nuys, the Miramar, the Windermere, and the Governor’s Cottage, finally settling in for a few weeks at the new Coronado resort in San Diego—likely paid for by her hosts and her speaking fees.29 Along the way, she gave occasional talks, generally revivals of her greatest hits such as “Sex in Brain,” and was feted at various parties. But mostly she and Smart relaxed. She visited beekeepers to learn about beehives and spent countless hours observing the peculiar habits of the California red woodpecker.30 Why did Americans travel to Italy or France to restore their health, Gardener wondered, when one could partake in “rambles in olive groves” and the “grape-cure” right in California, all the while staying in “fine hotels, well and healthfully appointed, with every luxury in easy call.” California, according to Gardener, was literally the “land of milk and honey.”31

  Gardener thrived in the West. Compared with the East Coast, she appreciated the West’s more democratic way of life, especially the comparative freedom western states afforded women. In an article about the California woodpecker, she approvingly observed that in California it was impossible to tell a man’s station in life by his job, his outfit, or his diction. In San Francisco, she had even witnessed Harvard men driving streetcars. For a woman constantly making and remaking herself, the openness of the West appealed. Reluctantly, in late October, the couple returned to New York and an uncertain future.32

  WITH THEIR PINCHED FINANCES, Gardener and Smart could not return to their beloved Upper West Side. Instead, they rented a room on West 38th Street from their friend Mary Phillips, later moving several miles and many streetcar stops north to 519 West 123rd Street.33

  Throughout 1898, Gardener prepared for the opening of the play The Reverend Griffith Davenport, based on her 1894 novel An Unofficial Patriot and starring the celebrated actor and playwright James Herne and his wife Katherine.
Gardener was thrilled to work with Herne, who also adapted the novel for the stage.34 Herne had made his stage debut in 1859 in a theatrical adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and earned his reputation as a dramatist with his 1890 play Margaret Fleming, which scandalized audiences when the titular character nursed the illegitimate baby born of her husband’s young mistress. Just like Gardener’s character Florence Campbell, Margaret Fleming scorned the errant husband and embraced the baby (the mistress died). According to his daughter Julie, Herne was fonder of The Reverend Griffith Davenport than anything else he wrote, save perhaps Margaret Fleming.35 In Herne, Gardener had found an ideal partner.

  But Herne made many changes to Gardener’s novel—including adding in a brother who remained loyal to the Confederacy (played by a relative of John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated Abraham Lincoln)—and risked “lavish expenditure” in demanding costly sets, which prohibited short runs in smaller cities and scared away investors.36 The New York engagement, reportedly costing $30,000, ran only four weeks in the fall of 1898. Nevertheless, Herne insisted on taking the play on the road.37

  The Reverend Griffith Davenport opened at the Lafayette Theater in Washington, D.C., in January 1899. The Washington Post reviewed it favorably, marveling at the elaborate sets and army of actors, including more than forty speaking parts.38 But a few days later, the Washington Times reported that the play had received a “condemnatory verdict” and would likely have to close early. Herne invested so much money in the production that he must have expected it would be “a masterpiece,” but it was “too complicated, too modern, and too abundant” to succeed.39 Because the play sent nuanced messages about war, heroism, and race relations, audiences were not sure what to make of it. “While it is exceedingly possible that an adaptation of An Unofficial Patriot could be made enjoyable,” another reviewer wrote, “there seems to be little probability of such a change.”40

  The play had its final run in Stamford, Connecticut, in May 1899.41 Herne wrote just one more play before dying of pneumonia in June 1901 at the age of sixty-two. Gardener recalled that she was bereft after his death because “had he lived we had planned much work for the future and to me he was a very great playwright as well as a good friend. His death was a real blow to me both financially and sentimentally.”42

  To Gardener, the stage debut of The Reverend Griffith Davenport had major personal and professional significance. She appreciated the opportunity to enact her Chenoweth-of-Virginia heritage, but the play’s failure, coupled with the untimely death of Herne, dealt her another grim disappointment. In conjunction with the Washington performance, a local paper interviewed Gardener in her room at the Ebbitt Hotel. She reflected on the personal resonance of the play: “My story has been a part of my life and I have felt keenly every line I put into it.” She shared that her brothers would be joining her in her box seats that evening. Bernard had been dead since 1870, William since 1882, and Alfred since 1887.43 Did the reporter write this in error, or was this wishful thinking on Gardener’s part? An Unofficial Patriot had remade Gardener as a Chenoweth of Virginia in the public mind, but there were no Chenoweths of Virginia left with whom to share this thrill. Nor could she expect another moment on the stage, as her writerly output had drastically diminished since 1894. The failure of The Reverend Griffith Davenport represented the end of two of Gardener’s lifelong dreams: to reconnect with the Chenoweths and to be a career writer.

  BACK IN NEW YORK, Charles Smart’s mental faculties declined, and Gardener struggled to take care of him and keep the couple afloat financially. From 1898 through 1900, she occasionally lectured and published, but she mainly rehashed old speeches and essays. She also sought new organizational homes and attended a few public events—sitting at the head table at the Eclectic Club luncheon and organizing a flag booth to benefit children orphaned by the cataclysmic 1900 Galveston, Texas, hurricane.44 In April 1899, she joined her closest friends, the historian John Clark Ridpath, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Dr. Edward C. Spitzka, in forming a new Psychic Study Club to scientifically investigate spiritualist séances, which were then in vogue. But if this club survived past its first meeting, no records remain.45 Even her favorite group, the Woman’s Press Club of New York, was undergoing an internal struggle that put Gardener once again on the outside of women’s organizations. For years, Gardener had been a confidante of the group’s adored president Jane Cunningham Croly, but after Croly’s death, the Press Club fractured. Gardener ran for a club office in 1899 but was defeated by the new guard.46

  The second-to-last short story Gardener ever published captures her lonely life during her final few months in New York City. “The Man at the Window” recounts the sad story of a man’s demise in the big city. A female narrator, not unlike Gardener, rides the elevated express train downtown and every day observes a fastidious man at work at his desk near the Fiftieth Street stop. As the weather cools, she notices that he does not move or put on his coat for several days. Fearing the worst, she exits at his stop and tells a policeman her suspicion. Together, they enter the man’s room and find him dead. “He had evidently been dead some days, in sight and hearing of hundreds,” the narrator recounts, “with his door unlocked in a house full of people, and no one had suspected that anything was wrong!” A person could die of loneliness and starvation with hardly anyone noticing because “the great metropolitan heart” was “so absorbed . . . with the throb of its personal pulse beat.”47

  As Gardener wrote this story, she contemplated the death of Smart, for whom she could no longer care at home. She had referenced his declining health since 1893, but the historical record does not indicate a clear diagnosis. His symptoms—heart trouble, fatigue, mood swings, depression, and eventually dementia—match any number of ailments, including the nineteenth-century epidemics of neurasthenia and late-stage syphilis. Like the heroine of “The Lady of the Club,” her best short story, Gardener had learned that the “the keenest agony that mortals ever bore” was the combination of love plus poverty. In the story, the wife refuses to hospitalize her ailing husband, even after his mental deterioration causes violent fits of rage. Instead, she poisons him and then herself.48 Depressed and enervated as she was, Gardener chose a different course.

  UPON THE RECOMMENDATION of their physician, Dr. John A. Wyeth, a Confederate veteran and surgical pioneer who was elected president of the American Medical Association in 1902, Gardener “took [Smart] by the hand” and reluctantly checked him into the Westport Sanitarium, in Westport, Connecticut, 45 miles away. Housed in a four-story gothic-style white building, the Westport Sanitarium specialized in the treatment of chronic diseases, which in Smart’s case were dementia and heart trouble. Smart had obscured from others the “the truth about why he was there” and “who sent him,” perhaps indicating a stigmatized condition. Smart selected the highest-priced room, and Gardener agreed, even though she had no money to pay for it. To fund Smart’s stay, she moved farther north, all the way to West 142 Street, and went into debt.49

  Gardener visited Smart three times a week. During what was to be her last visit, he received a letter. She asked if he wanted her to read it to him. He declined, saying he would read it himself eventually. Later, Smart returned from the water closet saying he had read the letter and that it was from an old friend in Detroit. The very next day, January 11, 1901, Smart died, just shy of his sixty-second birthday. Gardener found the letter in his death bed pocket. It was not from an old friend in Detroit. It was from his daughter Cora, and it referenced their life together. Smart had told Gardener that both of his daughters had died (only Iva had, in 1892), and she had no idea that he had stayed in contact with his wife and daughter all these years. She learned that Love and Cora had settled in West Virginia. Gardener realized that this must have been where Smart disappeared to in 1894, one other time when he told her that he had gone fishing for four days, and possibly other instances she had not discovered. This revelation was shocking. She had an especially hard time comprehending his li
berty to travel since “he had only the money I gave him.”50

  Even on his death bed, after a bout of “aphasia” so severe that he could not connect words, Smart had mustered the wherewithal to lie to Gardener about this letter. “Great God!” she exclaimed to her friend Mary Phillips, “what a strange thing the human brain (and heart) is!” Gardener reflected that her predicament was utterly baffling, “for in many ways he was a wonderfully good man and his love for me was tremendous in every way except the one of absolute truthfulness.”

  “On what possible grounds could this have gone on for a quarter of a century with a family tie that was in any conceivable operation elsewhere?” Gardener pondered. “It seems to me quite impossible.” And yet there it was. When she found the letter “in his poor dead pocket,” she looked at his face for hours “but no light came to me.” So, she packed up his belongings and sent them to his daughter because she knew that the daughter “most likely believed and trusted him as I had my own dear father.”51 Even in her shock and grief, Gardener behaved like the model women in her short stories—casting out the husbands and siding with the wives, mistresses, and daughters.

  In the sanitarium’s logbook, under the column for “married,” Smart’s entry simply reads “yes.” All the other entries in this giant book list the spouse’s name. Smart could not possibly have explained his complicated marital status in this small bureaucratic box. Friends claimed that Smart had told Gardener he had divorced Lovenia decades ago; and he and Gardener had lived together as husband and wife for nearly twenty-five years. To whom was he referring when he checked “yes” on his marital status? His legal wife or his day-to-day wife? Smart’s precise cause of death was also murky. The New York Herald ran a short death notice for him noting only that he died of heart failure. His death certificate, signed by the director of the sanitarium, lists “chronic myocarditis,” which often results from an infection, as the primary cause of death and “angina pectoris” as the secondary cause.52