Red Hook Road Read Online Free PDF

a high, shrill register and she said the most absurd things, like commiserating over the high cost of heating oil, as if the Copakens had anything like the financial concerns of the Tetherlys. It maddened Iris to find herself forced to act out the position of lady of the manor. In New York she knew and socialized with people whose financial straits were far more dire than Jane’s without ever confronting this attitude of resentful deference.
    Iris had little hope that they’d be like family, but she was determined not to allow this distance to evolve into dislike. She reminded herself that she admired Jane—here was a woman with no education and a miserable freeloader of an ex-husband, a woman who had started and succeeded at her own business. She was a veritable feminist role model.
    Iris sighed. There was a reason, she thought, that the English language contained no word for the relationship created when one’s children marry.
    Machetunim
, that was it. Iris and Jane were now
machetunim
. As, Iris supposed with a barely repressed shudder, were she and Frank, a legendarily mean drunk who in the winter drove snow plows and in the summer worked the roads, and who seemed no more capable of having fathered sweet, talented, open-hearted John than Jane did of having mothered him.
    When Iris returned to Mary Lou’s side she found that someone else had already provided the old woman with the desired drink.
    “Just put it down on the table,” Mary Lou said to Iris. “I’ll get to it soon enough.”
    Mary Lou was now surrounded by a group of Red Hook Library Board ladies, or perhaps they were garden club ladies, or Red Hook Women’s Club ladies, or VFW Ladies’ Auxiliary ladies, and they quickly turned their attention to Iris, their voices blending into a bubbling murmur of good wishes.
    So interesting with that canopy, what was it called? And the glass. They’d heard about that before, of course, but never seen it. A lightbulb? Not a glass at all? My, how clever, because a glass might not break, and then where would you be? The minister seemed not to mind having the rabbi there. But then the Unitarians wouldn’t, would they? Just try that at St. Paul’s. Can you imagine Pastor Osgood tolerating all that Hebrew?And Becca’s dress! So lovely, with the tulle and the beading. We heard she bought it in New York. Little Annie Field, from over by Dorchester way, she had her dress made in Boston, but New York, my goodness. What a distance. But, then, you live in New York, don’t you? Though your grandmother and my mother were in grade school together. And then your mother met your father in town, didn’t she? Of course he was from away. Just up for the summer, at Usherman Center. European, isn’t he? Oh my, Prague. A refugee, wasn’t he? Well he was certainly lucky. To have gotten out in time.
    The ladies’ attendance at the wedding was, Iris thought, an acknowledgment of her status as
almost
if not quite
of
this place. A few years before, an eager new librarian had inspired a mania for genealogy in the ladies and their retired husbands. The children who showed up at the library after school to pretend to do their homework found all the computer terminals and the long wooden tables full of grandparents peering through their cataracts at volumes of census records and church baptismal certificates. The luckiest of the amateur genealogists proudly created six- or seven-generation family trees filled out in spidery handwriting and complemented by gravestone rubbings on large sheets of delicate tracing paper. The ones whose great-great-great-great-grandparents were part of the original sixty Protestant families whose settlement of the township was a condition of the General Court of Massachusetts’s land grant began treating the scions of later-comers with a gracious condescension. Those whose family trees were sprinkled with names like Chenard, Benoit, and Giroux developed what the Roundys, Woods, and Hinckleys considered