House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  Chester stunned the family in December l933 when he revealed that he had secretly married one of his local girlfriends, the pregnant Luella Reid. Luella was by all accounts a “nice girl,” devoted to her father and truly in love with Chester. But Chester was a minister’s son, and an out-of-wedlock pregnancy was a serious matter. Chester claimed they had married a year earlier, in 1932. Ewan kept muttering over and over, “I don’t believe a word of it.” Of course Ewan was right. Chester was indeed lying. The young couple had married a week before they made their shocking announcement. Five and a half months later, Luella gave birth to a daughter, also named Luella.

  Maud spent months bitterly digesting the news of the hasty marriage — and Luella’s obvious pregnancy — but once little Luella was born, Maud fell in love with her brand-new granddaughter, whom she affectionately dubbed “Puss.”

  Maud had promised her daughter-in-law’s late mother that she would watch over the motherless girl. She visited Toronto, where the young couple rented a three-bedroom apartment, and gave what she considered to be good advice. Her suggestions were wildly out-of-date. For instance, she told the pregnant Luella to install a dressing screen in the bedroom so that her husband would never see her naked. Maud kept such a screen in her own room. Luella didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Modesty was the least of her problems. Chester was an unfaithful and inattentive husband. After a few months of misery, Luella moved back to her father’s house.

  The clergyman in Ewan Macdonald saw all this as further proof that his sins had been visited on his firstborn child. The presence of his little granddaughter left him stony-eyed. Maud commented, “In many ways Ewan is a very odd man, even when he is well, and never seems to have the reactions to anything that normal men have.” Ewan discovered something wrong with his blood pressure and heart, and the terror of this news drove him into a depression even more severe than anything he had suffered to date. Maud had thought nothing could match that terrible year of 1919, but 1934 proved worse.

  Ewan lost his ability to memorize sermons. He read shakily from written notes. One awful summer day, he broke down completely in the middle of the Sunday service. Maud drove him to the Homewood Mental Institution in Guelph. Both husband and wife desperately needed a respite — Ewan from the demands of his ministry, and Maud from the constant burden of caring for Ewan.

  Luckily, Stuart came home that summer, and Maud had the company of her son and her affectionate cat, Lucky, plus occasional visits from her old pal Nora Lefurgey, to keep her from unraveling.

  Still, Maud feared a total collapse. “This must not be. What would become of us all if I did?” Stuart had kept his promise not to marry Joy Laird, but it broke Joy’s heart and his, and Maud found her youngest son uncharacteristically distant. When he kissed her, or made her some toast and tea, it was an event worthy of comment. Maud escaped into daydreams of the happy past, when both sons were small and their needs simple.

  In this same period, her own creative gifts flagged. The loss of her “gift of wings” cannot have escaped her and was perhaps the cruelest blow of all. Maud published Pat of Silver Bush in 1933. Readers and critics have noted that Pat is one of Maud’s few dull child heroines. Pat’s main — some readers would say her only — characteristic is her neurotic, monotonous attachment to home, and her dread of “a terrible thing called change . . . and another terrible thing . . . disillusionment.” These two elements — change and disillusionment — were fiercely at work in Maud’s life. For once, she could not escape them in her art, nor transform them into fiction.

  Ewan came home from the asylum only to fall victim to accidental poisoning the next day. The doctor had prescribed some “blue pills” for him, but instead of the usual tranquilizer, the druggist had grabbed a bottle of deadly pesticide. Ewan immediately began vomiting and suffering from stomach cramps. Only Maud’s quick thinking saved him — and the fact that their local doctor happened to store the antidote to that particular poison.

  Ewan survived the close call but staggered on in misery. He was unable to preach in September and October, and the church issued an ultimatum: the ailing minister had till December to regain his strength or resign. Ewan received electric shock therapy as well as his usual cocktail of sedatives, hypnotics, and sleeping pills. His memory was shattered. Among other remedies — some of them home-brewed — Ewan was now taking chloral, Veronal, Seconal, Medinal, Luminal, Nembutal, and tonics containing strychnine and arsenic. Maud was fond of something called “Chinese pills,” which may have contained an opioid (similar to opium). Ewan walked around with a small bottle of alcohol-laced cough syrup in his pocket and drank from the bottle all day long.

  In February 1935, a misunderstanding with the Norval church people triggered the inevitable. Ewan was called to a special session meeting on Valentine’s Day in which, instead of being met with expressions of love, he was told that the local congregants “didn’t want to come to church because of him.” Luella Reid’s father was one of the men who confronted him. Ewan was at his best in the face of an open conflict. He learned that a letter had gone out from Presbyterian main headquarters advising the local churches not to let the ministers’ salaries fall behind. The congregants still felt sure that Ewan was the instigator. Hadn’t they always paid him on time? Why was Ewan setting the higher authorities against them? They did not realize they had simply received a form letter, one sent to all congregations.

  Even after the truth came out, hard feelings lingered. The Norval congregation insisted that since Ewan could no longer perform his duties, it was time for him to leave. They had seen him driving around with his famous wife on days when he claimed to be too ill to preach. Certainly all the gossip about Chester’s misdeeds had hurt Ewan’s reputation as well. Ewan was sixty-five, sick, depressed, and exhausted. He was done fighting.

  Years earlier, Maud and Ewan had gone together to see a beautiful, tragic movie called Journey’s End, a war film about a man at the edge of a breakdown. Maud loved the film, yet found it so sad she could hardly bear to watch it to its conclusion. Once the Macdonalds determined to move from Norval, they settled on a neighborhood in the West End of Toronto and fell in love with a home on Riverside Drive. It was an expensive house, but Maud made the down payment and took on the mortgage. Here at long last was not a church manse that could be taken away from them, but a proper home, “the house of her dreams.” Prophetically, Maud named the place Journey’s End.

  Nearly everyone who hears the story of Maud Montgomery asks the same question: Why didn’t she return to Prince Edward Island when at last she was free to go wherever she pleased? On a visit back in 1929, she wrote, “here only am I a complete being. . . . I never should have left it.” One can’t help wondering what would have happened if she had left Norval and gone home. Maud, too, played at what-ifs. She wondered in her journal, what if she had gone to Lower Bedeque before she or Herman Leard were engaged to others? What if Anne of Green Gables had been published earlier — would she have accepted Ewan’s proposal? What if Ewan had stayed on in Cavendish and they’d never left Prince Edward Island?

  Of course, Cavendish, too, had changed over time. By 1935, there was no longer even a Presbyterian church in town — the local church had gone United, a fact particularly wounding to Maud. The beloved old Macneill homestead had been torn down by Uncle John in 1920.

  As a final transformation, the Canadian government bought the farmhouse that had once belonged to Maud’s cousins David and Margaret Macneill — the famous house on which Green Gables was loosely based. Cavendish had become a popular destination for fans wanting to visit places they had read about in Anne of Green Gables. Now the government created a national park around the Macneill house. The magnificent park, forty kilometers long, contains beaches and dunes, spruce groves, Lover’s Lane, and the Haunted Wood.

  It was a year of exceptional honors. Maud was made a member of the OBE, an officer of the Order of the British Empire. Officially, she declared herself honored to have her wo
rk recognized by the government, happy that an authentic Prince Edward Island farmhouse would be preserved and the lands protected. At a more personal level, she was sorry to lose property that had long belonged to her family.

  In a strange way, the creation of the national park preserved the island’s connection with Maud’s work at the same instant that it severed her personal ties. Much on the island had changed beyond recognition. Beloved people and places were gone. Maud had memorialized them in dozens of beautiful books, in hundreds of stories and poems. Now she could only put her face to the future and hope for the best.

  Shortly before leaving the Norval manse, Maud had a dream of her Cavendish home. On the verge of what would be her final move, she dreamed:

  I was home again in my dear old room in Cavendish. I seemed to know that I was going to stay there. It was clean and fresh with a nice new window in it. The furniture was strewn about and parcels were lying everywhere but I thought, “I can soon bring everything into order and have my own dear room again.” Grandma was there, too, smiling and kind.

  Maud thought optimistically about the dream. It was a sign, she thought, that they were soon going to find a house that they could all love. Shortly after, she and Ewan spied a For Sale sign outside a house on Riverside Drive with tall pine trees behind it. The pines were enough to make her look twice. The house boasted a fireplace in the living room, and another in the recreation-room area of the basement. There was a beautiful casement window in the dining room, a large master bedroom with a walk-in closet, and a glimpse of the lake. “I knew I must have the house. What a place for cats to prowl in!”

  Despite Maud’s wounded pride at the way they were forced to leave Norval, she had something new to look forward to. And she would write Jane of Lantern Hill here — one of her few novels set outside of Prince Edward Island. Much of the story takes place in a neighborhood of Toronto like that of Journey’s End. Jane, the book’s young heroine, feels torn between her two parents and their two ways of life — one urban and sophisticated, the other seaside and rural. The book evokes the delights of both Toronto and Prince Edward Island; it is arguably L. M. Montgomery’s last masterwork, a novel of fairy-tale beauty, longing, and deft lightness.

  Maud’s capacity for love extended to people, places, landscapes, and animals — and among animals, cats reigned supreme. Just before the book’s publication, Maud’s favorite cat, Lucky, died. For Maud, it was more than the simple loss of a pet — she had lost her most trusted companion. She grieved for Lucky as she had not grieved in years. In fact, she dedicated Jane of Lantern Hill “to the memory of ‘LUCKY’ the charming affectionate comrade of fourteen years.”

  Maud had counted all her life on a handful of loved ones whose presence reliably lightened and brightened her days: her father; Will Pritchard; Frede; her youngest son, Stuart; and the cat Lucky. Now only Stuart remained.

  Maud fumed and worried about Stuart’s long-standing connection to Joy Laird, and against her own better instincts, she continued to meddle in her son’s affairs. She was delighted when he began dating a new girl, Margaret, in Toronto — and deeply chagrined when Margaret’s parents intervened to break up the romance. Margaret’s mother privately called the Macdonald household that “crazy house.”

  They had good reason to worry about the Macdonalds. Chester continued to behave in ways that would have horrified any proper middle-class family. Retired now, cast off from daily work, and at loose ends, Ewan shambled around Journey’s End looking ill and unkempt.

  Stuart conducted medical tests and found his father’s system dangerously taxed by all the medication he took. Ewan’s reckless combination of drugs had inflicted damage. Normally a peaceful man, he could become irascible, even violent. He once aimed a gun at Nora Lefurgey’s head, then tried to pass it off as a joke.

  Chester, the prodigal elder son, continued to behave disgracefully — chasing women and neglecting his wife and child, his studies, and his job. He could be charming when he chose. But he had a dark side as well. Maud knew that something had to be done to control her eldest son — but what? Her pleas, threats, and earnest talks all failed equally.

  Chester dropped out of engineering school to study law. His employer fired him for negligence and only took him back after pleas and promises from Maud. Chester and Luella had another child in 1936, a son named Cameron Craig Stuart, but Luella did not move back in, and Chester seemed just as glad to live without a wife and children tying him down.

  He began a long-term affair with a local woman. His daily behavior became more erratic. When his spirits were high, Chester gadded about, dating several women at once, chasing others, and taking parts in hammy theatricals. When Maud moved to Toronto, Chester’s employer remarked that he was glad she was moving close by. “You will be able to keep check on Chester.” It stung her pride, yet she knew her eldest son was out of control.

  In January 1937, Maud found and read part of Chester’s diary. We don’t know what she discovered, but it finally destroyed her trust in her eldest son. She wrote, “On that day all happiness departed from my life forever. . . . It cannot be written or told — that unspeakable horror. Oh God, can I ever forget that day? Not in eternity.” Whatever she learned created “one of the most dreadful situations a woman could be placed in.”

  Maud feared Chester must be insane. She hinted at dark secrets haunting the family. Had someone tried to blackmail them? We cannot know for sure, but in March, Maud was released from the worst of her anxieties. She had come into unexpected income from one of her investments — perhaps it was enough to buy Chester’s way out of his troubles.

  Maud changed the terms of her will so that Chester would inherit nothing — not even personal items — unless he was living with Luella at the time of Maud’s death. Marriage and fatherhood, Maud hoped, might stabilize his life. She arranged for Stuart to be executor of her affairs, since Ewan was in no condition to look after anything.

  When one of Ewan’s chronic headaches struck, he tied up his head in a handkerchief — an ominous sign of long, ghastly hours ahead. Now Ewan sometimes lurched around the house with a hot-water bottle tied to his head. Since he was mixing barbiturates, bromides, tranquilizers, and alcohol, as well as other mystery and herbal pills, it’s a wonder he could stand at all.

  In 1937, Ewan was invited to preach to his old congregation in Leaskdale. He was understandably anxious about going, but Maud insisted. When he told her he felt he was dying, she gave him smelling salts and sat him in the driver’s seat. Thus began one of the worst public nightmares of their life. By the time they reached the Leaskdale church, Ewan could no longer speak. He mumbled incoherently into the pulpit for a few minutes and then, in dazed confusion, sat back down. The congregation was kind, reassuring Maud that it had been good just to “hear his voice again.” They undoubtedly thought Ewan in some final stages of senility. On the drive home to Toronto, he lost his way, driving around and around in hopeless circles, and twice landed the car in a ditch. In the end, Maud and Ewan spent the night shivering at the side of the road, too frightened to drive the rest of the way home.

  Maud had long invented stories about her own life. But the story she now told herself was darkness and despair: in her words, “hell, hell, hell.” The journal, her trusty grumble book, became a record of howling anguish. Each year was the “worst year” — in 1924, in 1937, and again in 1940 – 1941. Confession didn’t ease the pain. For the first time, Maud’s storytelling — at least as reflected in her journals — only made things worse.

  It’s almost unimaginable that Maud remained as prolific as she did in this final, terrible period of her life. Yet she wrote a sequel to Pat of Silverbush, and began her final Anne book, Anne of Ingleside, in the spring of 1937. She worked on it all fall and finished it — her twenty-first book, she noted proudly — that same December.

  Anne of Ingleside takes us back to the happy period when Anne’s children are still growing and having innocent adventures. The novel features the dif
ficult, comic, and ever-complaining Aunt Mary Maria. Maud reveals a resurgence of her old fiery imagination in Anne of Ingleside. Eccentric characters step forward to take their star turns, and Anne, Gilbert, and their children feel like fully realized characters.

  In Ingleside, Anne moves into her own as a full-grown woman and mother. She is no longer the innocent, wide-eyed child. “Anne shivered. Motherhood was very sweet . . . but very terrible. ‘I wonder what life holds for them,’ she whispered.” The book reflects some of Maud’s own hard-earned life lessons: “Well, that was life. Gladness and pain . . . hope and fear . . . and change. Always change! You could not help it. You had to let the old go and take the new to your heart. . . . Spring, lovely as it was, must yield to summer and summer lose itself in autumn.”

  Maud wrote not just these books but a host of shorter pieces. In this same dark period, she composed a lively article about her favorite books, and sent countless letters of encouragement to young writers. Even in the depths of despair, she reached out to aspiring artists. Younger Canadian writers remember Montgomery as a kind and consistent mentor, always willing to help, edit, and introduce. She spared herself no time or trouble on behalf of others.

  Ironically, just as her creative powers were returning, Maud witnessed a further drop in her literary standing. She was edged out of the executive committee of the Canadian Authors Association. That wounded her pride and made her feel as she had in her isolated youth, an outlier living in a remote province. Mistress Pat, a sequel, was rejected by Hodder & Stoughton, the same company that had published Pat of Silver Bush. It had been a long time since Maud had experienced flat-out editorial dismissal. She went with a smaller company, Harrap. Mistress Pat proved to be a popular success. Later, when Hodder & Stoughton wrote to ask their spurned author for her next book, she turned them down flat. Maud did not easily forgive or forget a slight.