After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Life

Prologue

Toronto, Ontario

April 1942

Stuart turned onto his mother’s street and instinctively slowed the car. He clutched the wheel. Swallowing hard, he fought against a scream pushing up through his throat.

He kept thinking about the patient he should have been visiting that afternoon. She was young—younger than Stuart, and far too young to be in the business of having babies. Usually the young mothers healed quickly, but not this one. He still couldn’t figure out why. She had a long nose, crooked in the middle, and feminine eyes he worried could see all the way through him.

Would the doctor filling in for Stuart arrive at the woman’s house on time? Would he have the medicine he needed? He would be missing Stuart’s careful notes.

The woman’s family had filled her bedroom with flowers—there must have been five vases of them—all in shades of yellow. They reminded Stuart of childhood summers during the good years, with the house full of vases of flowers cut from his mother’s garden.

When he pictured his mother hard at work in her garden, pulling out vegetables and holding them up with a smile so big her teeth showed, his scream became harder to stifle. He shook his head. The urge to scream struck him as odd, at a time like this.

The car seemed to park itself. It occurred to Stuart that he might have tried crashing it into the curb. When else in his life would he be forgiven for such a lack of discipline?

He waited after parking, looking down to where his hands gripped the wheel. You have your mother’s hands, people said. His chin fell to his chest, and then the tears came. His mother. His mother the great author. His mother the beloved orator. His mother who made a fan of the prime minister of England, who turned a no-name island into a world-famous tourist attraction. His fervent coach and forever critic.

How could such a life be gone from the world on a day so bright and ordinary, with the newly laid pavement gleaming in the sun and the wind blowing a stray piece of newspaper down the road?

But here was Dr. Lane with his knuckles rapping on the car window, his voice muted by the glass. Dr. Macdonald. Dr.—Stuart.

Dr. Lane must have also gotten a call from his mother’s maid, Anita. Before Stuart could respond, his hands had moved, one to the door handle and the other taking the keys.

Then he and Dr. Lane slipped past the front hedges, which looked no less alive than they had the week before, in what struck Stuart as frank disrespect to the matron of the house. He pictured them as they should have looked, their top branches drooping in grief. His mother would have liked the image.

Dr. Lane handled the front door, and Stuart followed him up the staircase.

Stuart felt different when he reached the top of the stairs. Relieved. The bedroom door was closed. It would have been; his mother kept it that way. His brother, Chester, was always barging in without asking, but Chester was not there to supply his usual dose of chaos. He must not have heard the news. And their father—fully caught up in his own inner world for years now—was surely keeping to his spaces in the house. Left to his own devices, how long would it have taken his father to open the bedroom door? And if he had, how much would he have understood?

It never occurred to Stuart that Dr. Lane might open the bedroom door, until he did.

Stuart stayed with Dr. Lane’s stride on entering. He made the only choice he decided that he had: to treat this as he would any difficult day on the job. Stuart was a medical professional. His mother had made sure of that.

Why don’t you take care of things on the bedside table, Dr. Macdonald, Dr. Lane said, motioning toward it. I’ll take care of your mother.

The table was small. This could be simple. His eyes went first to the bottles of pills. He wondered why they made them all the same color, so hard to tell apart.

Stuart’s heartbeat had felt too high in his chest and now it hopped up even higher. When he reached the table, Stuart picked up the bottles one by one and tried to look like he was studying the labels. He contemplated taking out his notepad and copying down the drug names and dosages.

Instead, Stuart glanced at Dr. Lane. He couldn’t bear to watch what Dr. Lane was doing with his mother’s body, so he noticed instead the quiet. The doctor’s movements made no sound, and yet he had metal utensils. Why couldn’t Stuart hear anything? He turned back to the side table and picked up the bottles again, this time putting them back down deliberately and lining them up, reassured by the small clicks they made as they touched. The sound broke up the silence in his mind. Not satisfied, he reached for a sheet of paper also on the table, which had more potential. It would crunch nicely as he balled it up.

Stuart had not noticed this paper before, even though it took up more space than the bottles.

Or maybe that was not true, he realized, no longer considering balling up the page. Maybe he had seen the paper all along, but he had been trying to ignore it. He narrowed his eyes, tried to focus.

Moments later, both paper and pill bottles had been swept into Stuart’s medicine bag.

I can take it from here, Dr. Macdonald, Dr. Lane said. He came up from behind and put his hand—too cold—on Stuart’s shoulder. The gesture was startling, but the squeeze that followed told Stuart that Dr. Lane hadn’t noticed anything. He hadn’t seen the pills or the paper. He was only trying to be comforting, in his own stiff way.

Dr. Lane kept his hand on Stuart’s shoulder, guiding him out of the room, telling him to have a seat on the sofa in the living room, he would be right down.

As Stuart walked out, he took note of the ten volumes of his mother’s journals lined up on her bedroom shelf. The decision about when to publish them will be yours, darling, once your mother is on permanent vacation, she had instructed Stuart several times. When—but not whether—to publish them.

Stuart did not remember reading the paper on the bedside table, but as he walked down the stairs, he could hear its final words, as clear as if his mother was speaking them in his ear:

May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand.

My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it.

What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.

Later, perched on the couch in the living room, Stuart watched Dr. Lane’s hand as it filled out a stack of medical forms. Dr. Lane’s knuckles all had the same slight bend to them, spreading out like feathers, one behind the other. Never pausing.

Stuart had positioned himself close enough to see the forms, but he tried to look straight across from him at the wall with its pictures and paintings, carefully dusted. A photo of the fabled Aunt Frede hung in the middle. Frede had been his mother’s cousin and closest friend, but she had died young enough that Stuart knew her only through the countless stories that his mother had retold about their time together. In the photo, Frede peered out from a row of trees, hiding most of her body behind one of them, with a wide smile that did not match her stance.

Her personality was larger than life, his mother said. If only you could have seen the way she buoyed a room.

She understood me, parts of me, like no one else, she told Stuart once, and after that he had been more determined to ask the right questions.

The photo on the wall must have been taken at Park Corner, where Frede and her siblings grew up. Now it was another spot the tourists visited, home of the Lake of Shining Waters from the Anne books. The site where Lucy Maud Montgomery was married. He did not quite believe all this, knowing Park Corner only as a farm where he had spent stretched-out summer vacation days as a young boy, with more food than anyone could eat on the table and games with his second cousins from dawn until dusk.

He remembered the photograph, of course, but not here on the wall, dead center in the living room. His mother must have switched it out. What else had he missed on his daily visits?

Every once in a while, Stuart looked down at the medical paperwork. Never for long enough for Dr. Lane to notice, he hoped. One sheet had two columns of boxes with words next to them. Stuart had been waiting for Dr. Lane to get to this page. At the top, it said Possible Causes of Death. Second from the bottom on the right column was a single word: Suicide. Stuart could no longer avert his eyes.

Now each moment took up more space than the one before it. Stuart’s heartbeat seemed so slow that he thought to feel for his own pulse. The strange desire to scream came over him again, stronger than it had all day.

Stuart cleared his throat loudly, his voice squeaking a little as he did. His mother would have looked at him in that moment, pleading, an instruction in her eyes. Don’t get upset now, darling. You must put this unpleasantness out of your mind as soon as you can. Go on and be a strong man—the good doctor I raised you to be. The last thing I would ever want is to upset you.

Dr. Lane’s evenly bent fingers moved down. They passed over the box labeled Suicide and checked a different one. They turned the page over.

Stuart looked back at the picture of Frede. He let out a breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding.

Good, now that’s been settled. Please don’t worry any more over these pesky details, darling. They are not worth your attention.

Still, there was the fact of his mother’s letter—her suicide note—that Stuart had found on the bedside table. Dr. Lane did not know about that letter. He must never know.

But Stuart’s mind would not leave it alone. He’d missed something when he had recalled the letter earlier, he was sure of it now. But he couldn’t take it out to check, not while Dr. Lane was still in the room. And the mere thought of reading those words again made him ill.

The letter had been written on scrap paper; he was almost sure of that. But if it really was a stray sheet of paper, why did it have the number 176 written in careful script at the top of the page—the same sort of numbering he’d seen on the pages of his mother’s journals and manuscripts?

Now was not the time for guessing games. Dr. Lane was finishing up his paperwork, and soon there would be more questions to answer. Arrangements to make.

Still transfixed by Frede’s photo, Stuart thought instead of the chickens he and his second cousins used to chase at Frede’s childhood home at Park Corner, egged on by Chester. The chickens’ ugly wrinkled feet moved faster than their bodies, their squawks more sluggish still. The adults were always busy laughing at their own conversation, looking over from time to time only to make sure no one was hurt.

When Stuart remembered his mother’s laugh, the fullness of it and its way of implying things perpetually too old for him to understand, he thought of Park Corner. He imagined his mother’s laugh, played it over in his mind.

He’d last seen that laugh a few weeks ago at supper. Her body had made the usual motions, her shoulders bouncing and her cheeks lifting and leaving hollows by the corners of her mouth. But he couldn’t remember any sound.

I.

Kindling

Dear old world, she murmured, you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.

—Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 1908

1.

She ran the razor-cut edges against her thumb. On the frozen soil at her feet sat a cardboard box filled to the brim with papers. She’d extracted the set of journal pages in her hands from the top of the box. One of many series of days, removed and rewritten.

This particular entry consisted of ten pages describing a single weekend. Reading a few lines now, her hands shook with condemnation.

She had written these words innocently enough. It was not until rereading them years after recopying that she realized. All the while it had been there, buried beneath her descriptions of a perfectly ideal weekend. She had simply never seen it before.

So these pages must go. She couldn’t risk the Reader understanding what she had not. Dropping them now from her hand into the burgeoning flames below, she watched the pages brown, curl, and crackle in the old, satisfying way. The destruction of each one a worry lifted.

The date on the first page remained visible until the rest were all but ash. December 2, 1907. Birthday Weekend.

2.

Cavendish, Prince Edward Island

November 29, 1907

Birthday Weekend

Waves lapped at the feet of the sandstone cliffs skirting the north shore of the Cavendish peninsula. Further out at sea, each wave plodded along so slowly that it seemed to Maud they had all gotten together and decided it was high time for a nap. Watching them from her favorite rock perch, Maud’s gaze fixed out past the pebbled coves and scalloped orange cliffs, and her mind settled down to match the waves’ rhythm. How could she possibly stay angry at them for their rough-and-tumble ways of the past summer, tame as they were right now?

Just then, the midday sun broke through and splintered on the water into a thousand tiny diamonds. Maud blinked up at the sun and down at the sea, silently giving them thanks for the gift—on this day of all days.

But Maud’s mind never could stay in one spot for long, and soon enough her knees started bouncing under her skirt. The eager energy that had accompanied her most days since childhood pulled at her heels—even more so today because of the errand she planned to run later. An errand of pure extravagance. It might even be called an act of rebellion on an island of people bred of self-sufficiency—a thrilling thought, although the fact of its thrill was one of those truths that she had learned to tuck away and keep only for herself.

Worry not, dear sleeping one, she said out loud in the direction of the sea. Her small frame rose to face its massive one. I’ll be back to shower you with praise again soon enough.

Opening up her jacket to feel more of the air on her skin and pinning back a piece of impertinent brown hair, she made her way to the start of the closest trail through the woods. She loved these woods for the protective scarf they formed between the farms of Cavendish and the shoreline of exposed cliffs.

Walking through a layer of fallen leaves that made a happy percussion out of her footsteps, she decided she would take turns without paying any mind to where she was headed. Let her thoughts go where they pleased—one of her favorite pastimes, and a rare one these days. Then she could start the game of finding her way out, which would be a joy in temperatures so mild.

This was nothing at all like past Novembers, she realized as she walked. Not outside, and not the way she felt inside either.

The distance between this birthday eve and others in her past loomed as wide as a continent.

One birthday ago, there had been no publisher. There had only been her first full-length manuscript tucked inside an old hatbox collecting dust on the top shelf of her closet, with a series of rejection letters from uninterested editors piled on top. Anytime she’d gotten a glimpse of that hatbox, her heart had hurt.

Her last birthday had been too cold to go walking, and it was on that day, stuck indoors, that the part of her most devastated by the hatbox took shape in her mind with a personality all its own, as her deepest feelings had a tendency to do. The Fox, she named this one, and a well-groomed, gray fellow he was, with piercing eyes that knew their goal and paws that went bounding after it. The Fox had such a jolly time while writing was in progress, determined as he was to write something that would make its mark on someone, somewhere. The mark didn’t have to be sizable to be profound—any happy thought that a person wouldn’t have had otherwise, that was all the Fox was after. But while she stared up at that hatbox, Maud felt the Fox plain well curl up in a barren corner of her inner world. She came close to never sending out the manuscript again. If it hadn’t been for her cousin Frede—well, if it hadn’t been for Frede, the novel would be a different thing altogether.

Maud came to a fork in the path poised directly below an archway of maples with a good number of leaves still clinging to their outstretched branches. Walking under maple branches had always made her feel as warmed around the middle as a human embrace. She stopped for a moment to study the remaining leaves, yellow at the palms and red at the fingers. So lovely in their decay that she had never been able to imagine them being sad for it. Like the most fortunate old ladies she’d known, maple leaves got to show their brightest colors just before taking a happy float to the earth.

She did have, on her last birthday, a little diamond solitaire that she wore on her left ring finger anytime she was alone. Along with this secret engagement had come a flicker of possibility.

Long before the Fox, the Old Hen had been a persistent character in Maud’s mind, a noisy but not particularly influential creature who thought that having children would be just the thing; the balm to her woes. With the emergence of the diamond solitaire, the Old Hen began clucking away, thinking that her influence might grow in kind. The Hen insisted on an immediate marriage.

But marriage had not been possible then, not with Maud’s fiancé a continent away, their romance carried on in letters and postcards. And not with her grandmother getting on in years. Her grandmother had depended on her more and more in each of the years since Maud had moved back into the house to care for her—loath as her grandmother would be to admit that she depended on anything but the grace of God.

Two birthdays ago had been worse still, Maud recalled as she turned onto a path that took her directly between two straggly scrub oaks.

Two birthdays ago, there had been no engagement and no publisher. Not even a completed manuscript.

But the lowest of birthdays came before that, during those years when Maud was half convinced she would never be more than a spinster storywriter for magazines and Sunday school serials. In those years, each pronouncement of her new age stung like a wasp. A curious thing, her grandmother said once, for it is not as though you are unattractive or lacking for attention from men. It must be your ambition that’s to blame, or perhaps the quickness of your tongue. If only her grandmother knew how hard Maud worked to hold her tongue in response.

Accompanying the sting of each of those birthdays was the old sinking feeling that would start up in her chest come November. Her habitual winter blues. Not that anyone would have known it about her. To nearly everyone, she was a very jolly girl, always in good spirits, no matter the season.

Sometimes Maud imagined what would happen if everyone in her life knew her real thoughts. She’d feel some amount of relief at the truth coming out, no doubt. But she’d never be able to stomach everyone’s faces. Their pity would double the pain.

Maud emerged now into a small clearing and turned onto a path she knew well, looking up at more clinging maple leaves, their edges alight with the sun overhead. For a moment, she imagined them bursting into flames. She would have to run, because they would come raining down on her, but she would be tempted not to, just to experience them in their final glory.

With the coming of this birthday, Maud realized, there was none of the sting, none of the sinking feeling.

Not that her life now was devoid of concerns. But they were of a different kind. With no wedding date set for over a year now, and Maud’s grandmother not showing any sign of a real decline, the Old Hen fretted. Without a marriage, there would be no motherhood.

The Fox, on the other hand, was out from his corner and pacing with excitement. The manuscript was being edited and readied for printing. The publishers were pushing for a sequel. But the Fox was not satisfied. Not in the slightest. He wanted more, much more, and he eyed the Old Hen warily, skeptical of the effects of domesticated life on his livelihood.

But one fact stood out above all the rest, acting as a salve to Maud’s nerves no matter what the grievances of the minor characters populating her mind: This birthday brought with it the knowledge that determined Anne and her series of foibles and heartaches and triumphs would have a life outside of that old hatbox. And that fact alone made Maud clasp her hands together in joy as she walked out of the woods path and onto the main Cavendish road.

On the way back to the house, Maud made the single stop she had planned. How different it was from one of the usual errands she was tasked with on her walks—picking up a pound of flour from the town store, gathering a dozen eggs from a neighbor’s chicken coop, dropping off a letter for a neighbor too ill to pick it up from the desk where she and her grandmother sorted mail for the town.

As she approached the tall front door of the white, shingled two-story flanked by orchards where she had lived for the better part of her life, the cake that she had purchased sat on a covered plate in Maud’s hands and smelled just as decadent as she had hoped. A perfect mix of savory and sweet, with dark chocolate cake and cream cheese icing. It had been a marvelous idea: buying a cake baked by a neighbor for her birthday.

It had been Anne’s idea, actually, in the way that persistent little character was always whispering in Maud’s ear these days. Anne had appeared to Maud fully formed from the start, real as the ink under Maud’s fingernails. After spending a solid year in Anne’s company as she wrote the first manuscript, Maud was now plotting out a sequel. As hard as Maud was working to grow Anne up, she kept hearing the voice of Anne’s younger self. The door to Maud’s imagination reopened a crack, and eleven-year-old, orphaned Anne moved herself right back in, worn-out carpetbag in tow, with enthusiasms and whims unchecked. Once Anne started up talking in Maud’s mind, Maud had a hard time not hearing what Anne would have to say on a subject. Included among this chatter had been several distinct opinions about the celebration of Maud’s birthday.

You must have exactly the cake you would imagine for yourself in your wildest dreams! And don’t dare bake it yourself—cakes do have a terrible habit of turning out badly when you most want them to be good.

It’s your thirty-third birthday, after all, the same number twice, which makes it doubly special. A birthday must never feel the same as any ordinary day of the year.

Oh, and you must throw yourself a party too, one that feels like an exclamation point at the end of a stirring sentence. There’s no use waiting for someone else to plan a party the way you don’t wish it to be. No—you must conjure up precisely the party you would like and make it so!

Anne was difficult to argue with, which had been half the fun in writing her—and half the trouble with having her voice chirp away in Maud’s mind.

Cake still in hand, Maud walked straight to the kitchen as she always did, quick on her feet. Only now that she had left the outdoors did her arms register how tired they were from holding several pounds of cake still and upright.

Down went both cake and coat onto the old kitchen table. Maud looked around at the space, neat as always, with the dishes put away, the heirloom paintings fastened in their places, and the town’s mail sorted by surname into the cubbies in the old wooden post office desk that sat against one wall (its raised cover meaning that her grandmother had not quite finished sorting that day’s allotment). The white trim on every window was fresh and recently dusted. People often called it a pretty house, or a proper one. But its dearness to Maud went far beyond pretty or proper.

I’ll get to my jacket in a bit, Maud called out to the listening ears around the corner.

A year ago, the thought of her grandmother seeing Maud’s jacket on the table—let alone the purchased cake—would have made Maud tense and in a hurry to put things away. But a recent change in her grandmother had made for greater ease in Maud’s shoulders.

Or was it Maud who had changed? The thought came to her as insights often did, gone with her next exhale unless she paid it mind.

Her grandmother emerged then from the hallway, shaking her head and hiding her smile. Long, thin arms jutted out from where her grandmother’s hands fixed themselves to her hips, with her graying hair pulled in a tight bun and only slightly softened by a layer of bangs.

You’ve become a good deal less polite lately. Perhaps you thought I didn’t notice, her grandmother said, tilting one cheek up in a way that had become recent habit.

And you’ve become less ornery, Maud said, rising on her tiptoes to give her grandmother’s cheek a quick kiss. It’s hard to say who’s to blame.

It is a good thing we’ll be apart for a few days, I say, with you seeming to forget all your manners over such an ordinary thing as a birthday.

Maud watched her grandmother’s nose lead her eyes in the direction of the cake on the table.

I cannot say I’ll be cured when you return, Maud said. But I will do my best to save you some cake.

Where in the world has this come from?

I commissioned it.

Commissioned! What a thing to say, let alone do. Her grandmother paused. But I suppose it is your money. Her grandmother turned away from the cake then and started busying herself at the post office desk.

Maud smiled. It is, and plenty of it besides saved up.

I wouldn’t expect anything less, chi— Her grandmother halted.

Her tongue caught on her usual manner of addressing Maud. Age five or age thirty, it had been the same. Child this, child that. But lately her grandmother had been using the word less often. Could it be that Maud had heard the last of it?

Maud thought back to a childhood afternoon spent crying under her covers in her upstairs gable bedroom. Gulping in insufficient air between sobs, she prayed for the day when she’d be able to live with her father instead of two old curmudgeons who told her to hush and run along every time they had interesting company. That day, she made up her mind that when she grew up, she would talk to every child like an adult. At that age, there wasn’t a thing worse than being treated as a child who couldn’t be told real things.

All the more so, she had since learned, when she wasn’t a child at all.

Her grandmother took a breath and started again. You know that it may make things difficult in your marriage, Maud. It can be hard on a man, to have a wife with money saved up. It can give her too much independence for a man’s comfort.

Her grandmother stood still and waited until Maud’s eyes met hers. Her words had been addressed to Maud as an adult, at least, but they stirred a pool of hurt and anger, making it ripple. How swiftly her grandmother could turn blessing