The Invisible Hour: A Novel by Alice Hoffman

Author:Alice Hoffman [Hoffman, Alice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2023-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

PART TWO 1837

CHAPTER FOUR THE MAN WHO DISAPPEARED

He was the man who people thought had everything, and yet, he’d always been convinced he had nothing at all. He was prone to black moods, even though he was doted upon by his mother and two sisters, and was highly intelligent, as well as so extremely handsome that when he walked through the town of Salem women grew faint. It was said that Lord Byron had the same effect on women, but Byron was most assuredly aware of his good looks and Nathaniel Hawthorne never looked in a mirror. He had no vanity and feared that all he would see in a mirror was the family guilt he carried, the poisonous remnants of all the dread and horror his ancestors had been responsible for, a burden that rested squarely on his shoulders. The dark history of his family led him to write about sin and redemption and do his best to make amends for crimes he didn’t commit. He would change his name as soon as he was able, adding the w to distinguish himself from his predecessors, for his background was an embarrassment he wished to keep secret. His great-great-grandfather had been the cruelest judge at the witchcraft trials in 1692 and the only one to never repent; he and all his children had been cursed by the women of Salem, and now Nathaniel felt he was the one who must atone for the family’s sins.

He’d begun to feel different from other people when he was a boy of nine, after injuring his leg. Such small occurrences could change a life and leave a person with a completely different fate, a path they would never have imagined they might take. One moment he was a part of the pulse of the world, and the next he could only watch, looking past the shady elm trees, prevented from joining in by a pane of glass, divided from all others. The cause of his injury had been a game of bat and ball, and the result of that game was that he needed to use crutches and was housebound for close to two years. Nathaniel had spent nearly all that time reading, and sometimes he felt as if each book was a raft and he was out at sea, as his father the sea captain had been before his early death when Nathaniel was only four.

His childhood affliction caused him to be moody, with a dark cast to his thoughts, but he had also become a keen observer during his recovery, able to see what others might not. His observations of cruelty went beyond those of most boys his age, whether it be a butterfly caught in a spider’s web, or a homeless man on the street, or a stray dog set to howling. He began to invent stories then, written down in milk, what he called invisible ink, for he was interested in the telling and imagining, not in sharing the tales he concocted.

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