Her voice remains low, a library voice, a bedtime story voice; a soothing, unhurried monotone whether she is talking about her six children, about the car accident she had when she was 17, or about the ghost of the late Elizabeth Vanderhoop, sister of her first husband, William Vanderhoop, who drowned in the cistern when she was four, then returned as a spirit to hover near the house.

There is warranted mystery about Anne Vanderhoop. The 73-year-old matriarch of three generations, she is still-waters keeper of opinions and secrets. Part Narragansett, and Wampanoag by marriage, Ms. Vanderhoop knows the hidden footpaths through the bramble of Aquinnah’s contemporary history. She remembers the 1940s when water was pumped and carried in buckets, homes lit with kerosene lamps, laundry done on scrub boards, and federal recognition for the Wampanoags was still almost 40 years away.

“I thought this was the worst place in the world.” Her smile moves like a shadow across her face. “Gay Head was really backward when I came,” she says, and then talks about “being surrounded by the beauty.”

It’s late afternoon. She has just returned to her Aquinnah home, and before taking a seat at the paper-cluttered kitchen table, she softly greets Luther Madison, her husband of 25 years, who is resting in a nearby chair.

Somehow, maybe because she’s being asked to talk about herself, the day lends itself to reminiscing. Her gaze locks on the view of the wooded, backyard landscape as she recounts details about her childhood in Providence, R,I.

She tells of the strict and overly protective mother who raised her, although never officially adopting her from her birth mother, and brought her to the Island to work at seasonal jobs. As a teenager, Ms. Vanderhoop worked for her husband’s father, Napoleon Madison, at the Aquinnah - where she whimsically insists she has worked for 100 years.

She has no perceivable instinct to censor memory or opinion. She thinks this; she says this, and good and hard times begin sounding similar.

At 17, her dreams of becoming a laboratory technician were crushed along with her leg. The car she was traveling in with friends from the Vineyard crashed into an unseen trailer truck parked on the side of a road in Connecticut. The friend who had just asked to switch seats with her was killed. Ms. Vanderhoop’s leg was crushed against the heater box under the dashboard. Six weeks in a Connecticut hospital. Months of recuperation in Rhode Island. All her savings for school spent on medical bills.

She was 18 when she married the Island man her mother favored - William Vanderhoop, the driver of the car and later the father of her seven children. “I knew it was my only chance for freedom,” she says, “and I just had to get out from under.”

Not that she has had much idle time over the past 100 years.

During the season, she admits she barely finds the time to have a conversation, so busy is she working in the restaurant at the Aquinnah. “I’m on the line,” she explains. “Really. You have to have one [person] manning the gas stove, I manage the grill, and someone else managed the Fryalators. You can’t get off that line.”

Yes, a lot of people know her. “They all know me,” she says slyly, “and they think I know them. ‘Hello Anne, and how are you?’ I’m fine, but who are you?” She whispers a laugh. “I used to know everybody in the town. Of course, I don’t these days.” Even so, she swears she can identify whose car it is going past her State Road house in the off-season just by its sound.

All the friends she used to have, those the same age as she, are dead, she declares. The most fun, she says, was when she’d get up at first light for many years to go scalloping with them.

“That was the meeting ground for all my friends. We’d all meet down at the West Basin at 7:30. And I haven’t had so much fun since... Yep. There’s no one left in Gay Head,” she says. “A friend is someone who drops by your house, and you drop by their house, and have a cup of coffee, cup of tea, discuss what you have to discuss, and what you thought of the minister’s sermon the Sunday before. But there’s no one to do that with. I’ve looked.”

And she’s no longer interested in being as active as she once was in local government. “I’ve had enough. Everything is so formal now,” she says. “In the old politics - they’d sit around, get way off course, get to wrangling, by the end of the meeting one selectmen wasn’t talking to another. And it was a lot of fun.”

Events are neutralized by time and practicalities, except when it concerns the death of her son Todd, who died of spinal meningitis when he was two and a half. And then it is 1958 again.

“A perfectly healthy little boy,” she begins, who got the sniffles, and later that night, with a temperature of 107 degrees, was brought to the hospital, where she was told he’d be all right. Ms. Vanderhoop’s eyes brim with tears when she repeats the three a.m. call she got from the doctor: “I’m sorry to tell you, your son is not responding to treatment.”

The house is filled with photographs of family: her children Buddy, Ricky, David, Cully, Chip, Julie; her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A section of the wall between the kitchen and living room, never to be repainted, is an undated directory of names, an album of ages and marked heights. But she laments that when home movies are shown at family celebrations, the younger children don’t know who the people are.

“They say, ‘Well, who was that grandma?’ But my boys know all the old stories because we used to sit around and tell them and laugh, Ms. Vanderhoop says as her face lights up. “What would you do if you didn’t have a family?”