Red Hook Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

something of a perverse pride in their Acadian roots. Still, everyone agreed that if you couldn’t trace at least a few relatives to the period prior to the late-nineteenth-century invasion of the summer boarders, then you had, in all honesty, to consider yourself from away. Iris’s family name, Hewins, popped up on the township rolls far earlier than that. In fact, the largest porgy oil business on the Red Hook Peninsula had been owned by one Benjamin Hewins, whose father, Nehemiah Hewins, uncle of Iris’s great-great-grandfather Elias, took a musket ball to the fleshy pad of his thumb while serving in the 3rd New Hampshire Regiment at the Battle of Bunker Hill. These impeccable credentials somewhat made up for the factthat there was another branch of Iris’s family that came to Red Hook in the late 1880s, only because they could not afford summer cottages in Bar Harbor.
    From across the room, Ruthie Copaken watched as her mother attentively and gracefully chatted up the Red Hook ladies. It never ceased to amaze Ruthie how Iris, who was notorious for not suffering fools gladly, seemed to have an infinite amount of patience for these women. She attended every last bean supper and blueberry breakfast of the season, and never missed a library board meeting, even if its sole purpose was to debate, for the umpteenth time, whether it was appropriate to have a hermit crab tank in the children’s section. (
It’s a library, after all
, some of the ladies argued,
not a zoo
.) Iris, whose intellect was so firm and frightening that Ruthie’s New York school friends, themselves the daughters of bankers, doctors, and professors, tended to panic at the prospect of a conversation with her, spent her summers trying to befriend the wives of lobster men, few if any of whom had even gone to college, and none of whom she would have bothered to exchange more than pleasantries with if they lived in New York. That was what was different about Maine, especially Red Hook, Ruthie thought. When she visited friends in their summer homes out in the Hamptons or upstate, they never bothered to socialize with the locals, even going so far as to avoid the bands of local kids who hung out on the beach or in the parking lot of the Dairy Queen. In Maine the division between local people and summer people was as stark, but much more complicated. The locals were the ones who viewed the from-aways with a certain amount of disdain, and it was the from-aways who, in some sense, scrambled for approval. It always made Ruthie a little uncomfortable to watch her mother go so far out of her way to be friendly.
    To her sister, Becca, on the other hand, it all came so effortlessly. Unlike her mother, Becca did not actively seek out friendships with local people. She just happened into them naturally. Becca genuinely neither noticed nor cared where someone was from. If they were cheerful and amusing, if they tempered their comic sarcasm with kindness, if they could be trusted to douse a foresail and tack a jib, if they could make a decent pie—Becca was an avid baker whose blueberry peach crumb crust pie had won a blue ribbon in the county fair two years running—she was happy tobe their friend. Perhaps it was because Becca had been with John for so long that she was free of snobbery. She clearly didn’t view the local people as her social inferiors, which Ruthie always thought her mother sort of did, no matter how hard she tried to pretend otherwise.
    When Ruthie could no longer stand to watch her mother feigning enthusiasm (or, worse, perhaps, actually being enthusiastic) about the upcoming rummage sale on behalf of the Methodist church’s new roof, she crossed the room and slipped through the bevy of ladies to her mother’s side.
    “Hey, Mom,” she said.
    “Hi, honey,” Iris said. She slipped her arm around Ruthie’s waist. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
    “Yes,” Ruthie said. This was not entirely true. She never knew what to do with herself at big