“A great shame,” Grandpa continued. He shook his head. “She’s had it hard these past years. She seems to have turned in on herself now. Of course, one can hardly blame her.” He looked at his watch. “Bobbie, it’s past the time you usually leave. As for Laura and me—it’s suppertime.”
At supper in the panelled dining room, Laura continued to question her grandfather about Mrs. Macdonald. “Are you sure she’s the same person as L.M. Montgomery, Grandpa? Did you know her when she was my age? What was she like?”
Grandpa laughed as he scooped up a forkful of potatoes. “In many ways she was just a normal youngster like the rest of us,” he said. “In the summertime we picked berries and went trout-fishing and walked for miles in the sand along the shoreline. In the winter we sledded down the hills and went to parties in eachother’s homes. Maud was often the life of the party.”
“Grandpa, is she, is she a nice lady? Do you think she’ll she talk to me?”
“Who? Maud?” Her grandfather laughed again. “Well now, ‘nice’ may not be the best word to describe her. She doesn’t bother the neighbors much, I’ll give her that. She keeps to herself. Soon after we moved in here and I discovered that it was Maud living across the street, I went over and introduced myself to the two of them, thinking to get re-acquainted after all these years. The husband was cordial enough, though quiet. Maud seemed to remember me, but didn’t want to reminisce about the old days. She seemed distracted, as if she had too much on her mind. She’s not been well lately. It’s her nerves, mainly. At least, that’s my understanding.”
“What do you mean?” asked Lucy.
“Well, she seems to get easily upset. She’s nervous and anxious about small things that you or I wouldn’t bother ourselves with.”
“What kinds of things?”
Grandpa wiped his plate with a piece of bread. He chewed a moment in silence. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s a big chore just to get herself through the day, I imagine. Of course, it isn’t any wonder, with him the way he is.”
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.
“You ask a lot of questions that aren’t easy to answer, young lady,” he said, smiling at her. “I’ve never been told, but it may be a condition called senile dementia. Do you know what that means?”
Laura shook her head.
“Sometimes when people get old, they—well, their minds start to go. Just like your body sometimes begins to wear out— your joints get stiff, and your eyes aren’t as good as they used to be, and your hearing begins to go—well, it’s sometimes the same with the mind. You imagine things that aren’t true, you begin to think your friends are against you. Anyway, enough of all that. Here, let me take your plate and I’ll get us some dessert.”
Grandpa piled her plate on top of his and rose from the table. “Having a wife who’s famous doesn’t help either,” he continued. “Times are changing. Women like your mother are working in factories and enlisting in the armed services. But the way we, Ewan and I, were brought up—why, it was considered a man’s duty to support his wife. Ewan’s wife is supporting him.”
He disappeared through the swinging door into the kitchen and re-emerged with two dishes of canned fruit. “A special treat to welcome you,” he said, setting one of the dishes in front of Laura and the other in front of himself. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but anything in tins is almost impossible to get anymore. Every bit of tin and steel is being used for the war effort.”
“I know,” said Laura. “And bottles are hard to get too. We collect old bottles and wash them and scrape off the labels and take them to the hardware store. They give us twenty-five cents for a sackful.”
The fruit was chunky and sweet. “Grandpa,” said Laura, licking the syrup from her spoon, “tell me about....”
“Aha! I knew it was coming. Tell me about the olden days.’ Back a hundred years ago, when I was young.”
“Yes, but tell me about Mrs. Macdonald—about Lucy Maud.”
“Ah, Lucy Maud. She hated the name Lucy, I remember. If you called her Lucy Maud, she’d turn her head sharply with her little nose in the air, and her hair would go flying, and she wouldn’t speak to you the rest of the day.” He sat back, wiped his serviette over his moustache, and chuckled.
“I remember sitting behind her in school. One day I took some strands of her hair and knotted them together. Was she in a state! My chum, Nate Lockhart, was awful sweet on her. He would have done anything to have Maud Montgomery as his sweetheart. But no. No one was going to marry Miss Maud. She was going to be a writer—that’s what she always said. She was awfully good at composing, I remember that, even as a young girl. She wrote lovely verses about the sea and adventures of one kind and another, and I remember the excitement the first time she got a poem printed in the Charlottetown paper.”
“What did she look like? Was she pretty?”
“Pretty?” Grandpa cocked his head to one side and appeared to be thinking. “I don’t know if young Maud was exactly pretty. But she had beautiful long brown hair, I remember, reaching past her waist. She had a small nose and a thin mouth. Her chin came to a tiny peak, and her ears were pointed. She looked a bit like a pixie or a wood elf, especially when her eyes got a dreamy look in them.” Grandpa chuckled to himself as he spooned up the last of his fruit.
“Why are you laughing?” asked Laura.
“I’m remembering again how spirited Maud could be when her temper got the better of her.”
Laura leaned forward, smiling eagerly. “What did she do?”
“Well, we had the custom of bringing little bottles of milk to school to drink with our lunch. Of course there were no refrigerators in those days to keep the milk cold, so we placed our bottles in the little brook that ran alongside the school. The running stream kept the milk cool. Then at lunchtime we’d all go whooping down to the brook to collect our bottles of milk and go off and enjoy our lunch. But poor Maud wasn’t allowed to stay at school for lunch. For some reason she had to go home to eat. And was she angry about that! She so badly wanted to have a milk bottle to put in the brook and share the lunch hour with the rest of us.”
As Grandpa spoke, Laura’s mind started to wander. She pictured the little milk bottles with their thick bodies, narrow necks and wide openings nestled in the rocks with a fast flowing stream running over them. But in her daydream the milk wasn’t white in colour, it was brown. Chocolate milk. She remembered— how long ago was it? Two years ago when they were ten?—a school trip to a milk factory. The class had seen the milk being poured from huge vats into regular-sized bottles, like the ones they drank from at home. Then they watched as the bottles moved like toy soldiers in an assembly line toward the arm of a big machine that clamped lids on them. And then, at the end of the tour the children had been given samples of chocolate milk in the kind of small bottles that she imagined lay in the Cavendish brook.
After they drank the chocolate milk, the boys had held a contest with the empty bottles, lining them up on fence posts and throwing pebbles into them. Peter got the highest number of pebbles in his bottle.
What fun they could have had in Toronto together, going to movies and riding the streetcar! The only problem was, Peter was—. She leaned her head on her elbow and stared at the shiny dark wood of the tabletop.
“Shortly after my time in Cavendish, Maud went out west to live with her father,” Grandpa was saying. “She was sixteen, I remember. But her stay out there was short-lived, only a year. She didn’t get along with the father’s new wife, so I heard. But look here, what’s happening to you, my Laura? Are you falling asleep on me?”
Laura