The Cliffs

by J. Courtney Sullivan

Great men visited to learn what they could from our ways. George Washington. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the Shaker faith, “If their principles are maintained and sustained by a practical life, it is destined eventually to overthrow all other religions.” We believed the world was coming undone. War, greed, suffering. Lust. All were signs that the end was near. And yet we gave every bit of ourselves to our work. To the weaving and sewing and washing, to the gardening, the farming, the creation of buildings and bonnets and bottled herbs.

They called themselves the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Outsiders, in mockery, called them Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, because of their ecstatic way of worshipping. In time, they reclaimed that name for themselves. They believed in spiritualism and messages received directly from God. They believed the second coming of Christ would arrive in the form of a woman.

Later, she had a vision of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and understood that her struggles had been sent down as divine punishment. Concupiscence was the source of evil in the world. Therefore marriage must also be against God’s will. Jesus spoke to her. They became one in body and spirit. She was the second coming, the female half of the whole. The Shakers made her their leader. She could read anyone’s past or future. She could heal broken bones and cancers with her mind.

Already, I could see the top of the baby’s head emerging from between her legs. Round and impossible, yet there it was. The sheets were soaked through with blood. It pooled on the hardwood floor. Hannah let out a groan, a wail, the likes of which I’d never heard. The child did not cry. Hannah said she could tell he wouldn’t survive. I had no idea whether or not it was true.

Little Alfred lasted two days. Afterward, Hannah sat rocking him for another day and night. As she did this, she told me about the other children she had lost.

Hannah told me she had been pregnant seven times.

Her husband returned the third week of March. Samuel was handsome—tall and broad-shouldered. You could easily see how the two of them made a pair. At night, I heard Hannah crying behind the closed bedroom door. And him pleading, telling her he hated to see her this way. He insisted she get dressed; that she eat meals with him in the dining room. “Please, Pet, I only want you to be happy,” he said. “I won’t be home for long. Let’s make the most of the time we have.”

He wished her to be happy. He wished her to be the girl she was when first they met. He may as well have wished her to be a deer traipsing through the woods, so grotesque and impossible was his request.

Hannah had no interest in looking at them, or at the silks he brought her, or even the jewelry. I could see how it hurt Samuel. I felt sorry for him.

After our father left us, she wrote, he met a woman and married her, and never let on that he had been married before. Their daughter had come to Sabbathday Lake in search of my sister and me. She explained to my sister that her father—our father—had recently died, and had told her on his deathbed about the two daughters he left behind.

I had believed for as long as I could remember that my father was gone, and now he was. What difference did it make? But I could not stop crying.

“Eliza?” Hannah said. “What is it?” I told her. Afterward, she sat beside me on the bed and held me. She said, “When I was small, I thought I’d have eight children. Now I would do anything if God would grant me one.” I assumed she had turned her thoughts back to her own troubles. But in fact, she was thinking of me. “How could he?” she said. “Leave his precious children like that?” We talked for hours that night.

I never had an image in mind for how life ought to look. I believe that to be the most freeing fact of my existence.

Do all your work as if you had a thousand years to live and as you would if you knew you must die tomorrow.

In every graveyard in every town in all the world, there lie buried stories more remarkable and strange than a name, a date, a designation on stone could ever in a million years convey.

“I swear to you, I will never drink again,” she said. David stared at her, disgusted. She hadn’t seen that look before. “Did you sleep with him?” he said. “No,” she said. Though she was not one hundred percent sure. She couldn’t bear to call Tim and ask; nor did that seem like a good idea. “I am so sorry,” she said. When David didn’t answer, Jane added, “Should I leave?” “I don’t know,” he said. “No, no, of course you shouldn’t.”

Jane could not believe what was happening. Three days earlier, they were holding hands, walking along the Charles, making summer plans. Last night, they had gotten ready for the party together in this room, Jane tying David’s tie, David fastening the clasp on her necklace, gently pulling her hair back, kissing her neck. They were trying for a baby.

“Harvard is willing to pay for you to go to rehab,” Melissa said. “I will email you all the information.” “Thank you,” Jane said, but she knew she wouldn’t go. Rehab was for the true fuck-ups, she thought. People who put vodka in their morning Cheerios. Rock-bottom people. Though what was this if not rock bottom? In the weeks that followed, Jane missed her office.

Their apartment, usually full of banter and laughter and conversation, turned silent. They stopped having sex. They still slept in the same bed. One night, lying there, staring at his back, certain he was wide awake, Jane wondered if this was just how they would be from now on. David would never leave her, but would he ever love her again? Would he forgive her? Would he be okay if she allowed him to pretend they could chalk what she did up to grief and nothing else? He was such a good man. He had done so much for her, and in return, she had trampled on his heart. Jane was broken.

“I think we should take some time apart,” she said, trying the words on. “This isn’t working anymore.” She wanted him to protest. The idea of either of them leaving terrified her. But David didn’t push back. He just shrugged, without turning to face her. “If that’s what you want,” he said. Jane left for Maine the next day.

There were versions of death that existed inside of life, Jane thought. Her drunken blackouts, that time unaccounted for. The state Betty and the other patients here were in, almost the opposite of being ghosts—a body with no awareness, no memory. The shadows of past lives all around in graveyards, in old houses, in Jane’s work as an archivist. In stories.

On Betty’s nightstand were framed photos of her children and grandchildren, and a shot of Betty and Richard on their wedding day. Jane wondered if these were meant to jog Betty’s memory, if they brought her comfort or confusion or no feeling at all. Maybe the pictures weren’t even for Betty, but there as a reminder to the doctors and nurses that she had once had a life every bit as full as theirs.

Human beings did so much damage to one another just by being alive. To the people they loved most, and to the ones they knew so little about that they could convince themselves they weren’t even people.

Naomi woke up in the stillness of their bedroom and had her answer. It was as if someone whispered it in her ear. Sawadapskw’i. She recognized the word because she had underlined it for Jane Flanagan, suggested maybe it was the original place-name of the town where Jane lived, the one called Awadapquit now. And hadn’t Jane mentioned a story out of that area, of men kidnapped by some early explorer? Jane had opened a little museum down there. She was eager to include stories about Wabanaki people. She asked Naomi for advice sometimes; hired her to consult on certain projects.

She allowed herself to imagine that there really was a woman who had been waiting four hundred years somewhere, on a cliff, for her love to return. Naomi was not a romantic by any stretch. But in this moment, at this hour, in the light of the almost-dawn, she believed.

The silver lining of being a total fuck-up was that you could sometimes find the grace to give others a pass for their failings. Or if not a pass, at least some understanding.

A year after they listed the house, Genevieve surprised Jane by calling her with a proposition: Lake Grove could be the location of the new historical society. Her husband had agreed to sell it at a cut rate if the town would purchase soon. There were a few other financial stipulations, which would benefit Genevieve and Paul tax-wise. And one more thing: they wanted the place to be named in their honor. Jane understood that this was likely the only way they could think of to save face. Throw money at the problem, like they always did. She told Genevieve she would call her back.

Jane had submitted the idea to Historic Homes of New England, the organization where her friend Evan once worked, which bought up old estates and farms and houses for this very purpose. She wrote an impassioned pitch, beginning with a quote she had never forgotten, from that professor she had studied with for two seconds at Bates when she was in high school: Most lives will be lost to time. Jane detailed how the museum’s focus could be the real women who lived in the house, in the context of their historical moments. HHNE loved the idea. They hired Jane to be the museum’s director.

Genevieve showed up unannounced one day with a television crew from the local New England show Chronicle, to film a segment some paid publicist had arranged about her extreme generosity and commitment to preserving the past. When an article appeared in The Boston Globe with the headline AFTER WORKERS MADE A GRIEVOUS MISTAKE, A HOMEOWNER RIGHTED THEIR WRONG. And when, as agreed upon, Genevieve had a plaque hung directly above the one honoring Samuel Littleton, with the words MADE POSSIBLE BY PAUL AND GENEVIEVE RICHARDS.

Jane repopulated the house with the belongings of its former inhabitants. The town provided the funds to buy back Hannah Littleton’s mourning ring. At an antiques shop on Route 1, Jane tracked down the sign from the Lake Grove Inn that Genevieve swore had gone in a dumpster. John Irving, the junk guy Genevieve hired when she emptied the house, gave Jane three boxes of random items he hadn’t been able to sell, including a portrait of the Troy sisters, the same one that hung over the fireplace for decades.

Rose Littleton, Samuel’s distant relative who still lived in Awadapquit, put Jane in touch with one of Fannie’s great-granddaughters, a doctor in Toronto named Mabel. Mabel donated two jade green china plates and one bowl to the museum, with a note explaining that they were what remained of a set that Samuel Littleton brought back from a voyage to Europe.

An old woman who grew up in Awadapquit and now lived two towns away told Jane that Ethel’s fiancé had not abandoned her or dodged the war, as the story had it, but that in fact he was an abusive drunk, and she and her sister Honey had killed him, hiding his body in the small secret bedroom upstairs and, one night, under a full moon, tossing it off the cliff.

But when Jane told her story to the group, no one said, AA seems like an overreaction, as she imagined they might. She got the same sympathetic nods and knowing winces as everyone else. She now went four times a week. She ran there and back on nice days, sweating on arrival, heart pumping hard. There were moments when Jane thought of how her mother and grandmother once sat in that same room and told stories about their lives that she would never hear. She missed them both. She thought she would do just about anything to have the chance to introduce them to her daughter.

Emily Dickinson tattooed on her wrist: That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet.

There was one exhibit that moved Jane to tears, on the subject of Native Americans and epigenetics, the newish field of study that said the effects of mass trauma—genocide, slavery, colonialism—got passed down from one generation to the next at the cellular level. Native Americans referred to this as the soul wound.

If trauma could be passed down from the cells of one body to another, Jane wondered, was it so much further a leap to imagine that trauma might infect the land on which it happened? Was that a form of haunting all its own?

In this place she was building, Jane wanted to make clear that the beginning of American history was Indigenous history. As much as she thought of the women who had lived in the house at Lake Grove, she was keenly aware of the ones who came before them.

The man reached for the woman’s hand. Jane felt a twinge of envy. She looked away. She thought of David. He came to visit every few weeks. More often lately, Jane had noticed, though she didn’t say anything about it, not wanting to upset their delicate balance.

She sensed David still moving through it all, trying to figure out what he could forgive, what he could live with. They loved each other, and said so. They had made a perfect baby girl together. Even if that was all they could ever be, it was enough. When they were married, it felt impossible to imagine settling into the expected family dynamic—husband, wife, kids. The only plausible scenario, then, was for them to break apart. Jane never thought to imagine them settling into something unexpected instead.