The Burden

Victoria Olsen

Gagged by Earle Olsen, 2001

Word Count 1255

I was sitting in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco in 1993 when my father told me his secret. “Everyone deserves love, don’t you think?” he asked. Yes, to love! “Don’t tell anyone,” he added. I chose a fortune cookie carefully and promised. Then we went to my younger sister’s apartment, and he extracted the same promise from her. Then my youngest sister.

In 1970 my sisters and I had sat on the edge of our parents’ bed in their room overlooking the Hudson River (one sister remembers this as the kitchen). I was the eldest, but only six years old. “Your mother and I don’t love each other anymore,” my father said. The rest was made clear: having a family had gotten in the way of his painting. To rededicate himself to his art, my father would have to leave. It was confusing. I had a vague sense that he’d be moving into a painting studio. Yes, to art; who could be against it? But it became a rival for my father’s affections. My sisters and I spent every other weekend with our father, who took us to museums and antique stores, to Europe, and Upstate New York. We all went into art-related fields and stayed close to him.

When my father passed away in 2011, I still said nothing about his secret. Did his neighbors know? We assumed not, and they must have assumed we didn’t know. No one mentioned it. My sisters and I divided his art between the three of us, but still threw away hundreds of paintings he had made every day after he retired upstate. He never released us from that promise, but did it expire when he died? Is my father’s secret still his, or is it mine now?

In 2019 I started a family history project about my father’s career, but his secret kept hijacking my work. I knew it would come up, but I put off dealing with it, instead focusing on the archival research that felt most comfortable. On a trip to Washington, D.C. I visited a museum with a cousin who lives there. I told her about my research as we walked around the galleries she knew well, our steps echoing on the marble floors. She had been a docent there, and I hadn’t seen her in years. We both write, teach, and work with art. It made sense to catch up there.

Like all my cousins, this one is on my mother’s side: my father’s only brother died in World War II. Ten years younger than me, she would have met him only once or twice — perhaps at my wedding. I tried to fill her in about my new project. I hadn’t planned this conversation, and I should have. I described searching the Smithsonian’s archives, but I veered too close to my father’s secret, pausing in confusion. If I told my cousin, she might tell her sister or her mother. They probably didn’t know. I could ask her not to tell them, but that would extend the burden. What did I still owe my father? We walked on. We both admired a Kerry James Marshall painting, and she showed me a huge Nam June Paik installation of TV screens in the shape of a map of the United States. Shows from my childhood ran on repeat from every screen, and she pointed to the tiny embedded camera that projected our images where D.C. should be. I was exposed.

We were on the second floor, in front of a George Catlin painting, when I felt a wave of tingling nausea wash over me. My father loved Catlin, didn’t he? I wasn’t sure; all those museum visits and his collection of art books blurred together. He loved George Caleb Bingham, and maybe I was confusing the two artists and their Old West tableaux. My heart rate accelerated even more, and I was afraid I might faint or throw up.

Later when I met my husband under the vaulted ceiling at D.C.’s Union Station, still wary of eating and trying to stay calm, I wondered what happened. Was I dehydrated on a sun-baked July day? Did I eat something off? I couldn’t figure it out.

“Could it have been the idea of telling my dad’s secret to my mother’s family?” I asked.

My husband leaned back in his chair and laughed. “I’m going to make you a t-shirt that says My Dad Was Gay, so you don’t have to tell anyone.”

Instantly, the nausea was back, and I gulped air. “Don’t say things like that!” I snapped. “It’s not funny.”

A t-shirt, public to the world! Those words, written on my body.

As a biographer, secret-telling is part of my job, but this one made me panic. Eventually, though, I started asking people who knew him, awkwardly, whether they thought it was okay to tell. I wanted permission. “He’s gone,” my husband said, sitting on the couch after dinner. “Times have changed,” my friends shrugged. So why did I hesitate? “I give you permission…,” his oldest friend announced. I smiled, expecting the usual benediction. “…not to tell anyone.” Oh.

Asking for permission, I discovered, actually required telling people in the first place—and, to my surprise, some already knew. I found people he met in art school in the 1940s who knew and old friends whom he himself had told. In fact, over the years I myself have told more people than I realized: my husband, a few friends, and then some colleagues as I described the book project. It’s like I was practicing for the big reveal.

Still, over the course of months of research, I grew more and more anxious, expressed as physical symptoms. I had panic attacks in museums and hyperventilated in restaurants. Walking up Broadway on the Upper West Side, past the apartment I was born in, towards the building my father moved out of, I burst into tears. “You’re not six years old anymore,” my therapist told me. I didn’t believe her.

When I first tried outing my father, I balked. “I wrote down all my father’s secrets,” I concluded in an essay, “and then I tore up the page.” I was teaching Maxine Hong Kingston’s essay “No Name Woman” to first-year writing students at New York University at the time, and family secrets were on my mind. I admired how she told hers, but we noticed in class that she was also coy: was it fiction or memoir, or something in between? After drafting my own essay, I flinched and filed it away.

“What does holding onto the secret do for you?” a dear friend asked. We were sitting in a restaurant eating oatmeal and eggs after his father passed away. As I answered, haltingly, I figured something out: “it keeps me close to him.” It keeps him alive, in the present tense, and us bound together. Keeping that secret was a bequest as much as a request and I held it tight for these ten years he’s been gone, internalizing his burden and the shame he felt. Telling is a way to release him, as I knew it would be when I first tried (and failed) to write this down so long ago. That secret was a heavy, heavy weight, but it’s mine now. My father gave it to me.

Victoria is working on a family memoir about her father’s art career. She published a biography of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron and taught in the Expository Writing Program at New York University for eleven years. You can find more of her writing at vcolsen.substack.com