Hide
by Matthew Griffin
Bloomsbury. 257 pages, $26.
THIS DEBUT NOVEL presents the pleasures and pains that go with any long-term relationship, as well as the special challenges that come with one that has to be kept secret due to social prejudice. Frank Clifton and Wendell Wilson meet and fall in love in North Carolina, soon after Frank returns from World War II. Given the prevailing attitudes of the time, they’re forced to go to great lengths to hide their relationship to preserve their safety. They buy a small house far from town, hidden from the road by trees, and every year they plant more. In their sixty years of living together, they only leave the house together once. Frank’s sister tracks him down, and he leaves her on the front porch, asking her to never return. They stay away from the politics and social life of their town and workplaces—a steel mill for Frank, a taxidermy shop for Wendell.
The novel begins in the present day, when Frank collapses from a stroke while weeding his garden. He’s rushed to the hospital and eventually returns home, where Wendell begins the process of caring for a partner who cannot accept that his body no longer works the way it used to. For a man used to hard physical labor, who survived the Normandy landing at D-Day, this is a difficult adjustment. Frank is stubborn, frustrated, and cranky, and Wendell is annoyed, prickly, and sniping with his jabs; in short, they act like an old married couple. Beneath it all is a deep love that has sustained them through all the challenges they’ve faced.
Secrecy has become such an ingrained habit for them that even now, when so much progress has been made with gay rights, Frank and Wendell keep to the ways that kept them alive from the beginning. Wendell is aware of gay pride parades but greets them with irritation and resentment, making snide remarks about young people parading around in their underwear and flashing rainbows everywhere. Considering that he had to run away as a young man when his family discovered his sexuality, it is perhaps understandable that he can’t bring himself to celebrate the carefree self-acceptance of today’s gay youths.
Frank continues to get worse, both physically and mentally. Wendell cares for him as best he can, sometimes having to fight against Frank to keep him safe. He goes through weeks where all he makes are desserts, trying to find the one that Frank will eat more than a few bites of, only to discover that his partner’s favorite is now a storebought shortbread. The scenes showing Frank’s growing dementia are painful to read, especially one involving Frank’s beloved dog. Even in all this heartrending decline and loss, however, there are moments when Frank becomes his old self, and he and Wendell return to the loving couple they were when they first started out. It is these glimpses, and his memories of their love, that keep Wendell going.
Both beautiful and painful, Hide is a wonderful first novel. Full of humor and tragedy, the book reveals the sacrifices that people are often willing to make to keep their love, even if they must hide it from the world.
