Louisville 2006
“Isn't the computer a marvel?” said the woman who greeted Randa and Susie at the door of her home. “I've been trying to get information about my brother for years. Then my grandson goes online, and here you are!” The house was on a wide, quiet street featuring deep front lawns, high hedges, and large trees. “Well heeled” was the phrase that came to mind—and not recently well heeled. This neighborhood had been established for some time.
The woman's name was Cressida. Aunt Cressida, although she'd asked Randa to please dispense with the “Aunt.” She was somewhere in her fifties—tall, gray-haired, and with a full complement of laugh lines. She hugged like she really meant it, which was definitely not what Randa had been expecting.
So scratch the Evil Ice Queen image I've been carrying around for the past twenty years. But she still has some explaining to do for that night in Indiana.
Susie had already decided to like her. “So your name comes from the play Troilus and Cressida?” she asked.
“Gruesome, isn't it?” said Cressida. “You wouldn't believe what the other children did with it, when I was growing up.”
“Try me,” said Randa.
“Ah yes. You were hung with that idiotic woman/child from The Tempest. You'll have to blame my mother's people for that; torturing their children with Shakespearean names was a family tradition. Your father got off easily with Richard.” There was the same lilt in her speech that Randa remembered from listening to her father. And she had a way of crinkling her nose when she smiled that Randa remembered too.
Okay, she seems nice. But there was still the prime rib dinner issue.
Cressida served them cookies and lemony iced tea. They sat at a table in a circular alcove at the back end of a large, bright kitchen. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out over a pretty English garden. The chitchat phase of the visit passed quickly; Richard's death was touched on, and Susie's genius with the computer was praised. Finally the time had come to talk about the reason Randa and Susie had flown to Louisville.
Cressida began. “You want to know about Richard.” She fixed her gaze on the garden outside. “It all started with our parents. My mother and father never should have married.” It was clear she'd thought about this a lot. “Mother was artistic. She loved music, and museums, and the theater … especially the theater. That was her real passion. She read all of Shakespeare's plays to us when we were children, and she had a Shakespearean quote for every occasion. It used to annoy Father no end.
“My father wasn't a bad person; he was just a man of his day. He expected his wife to care for the children and run his home efficiently.” Cressida laughed softly. “Mother never did anything efficiently in her life.
“Things deteriorated when she started spending her time at the community theater. If she'd limited her cultural interests to things Father could understand, like charity work for the symphony, I don't think he would have resented it. But she was acting in plays with an amateur drama group, and most of the people involved were long-haired Communists as far as he was concerned. He forced her to stop. That was when she really …” Cressida turned to Randa. “How much did Richard tell you about her?”
“Nothing,” Randa said. “He wouldn't talk about any of you.”
Cressida looked back at the garden. “Mother drank. I think she had always had a cocktail or two, even when she and Father were first married. But as she became more and more unhappy …” Cressida stopped again and looked at Susie. “Perhaps Susan would rather go into the family room and watch television? Or she can use my computer—”
“You can say anything in front of Susie. We talk about everything.”
“Our family should have done more talking.” Cressida's hands were clasped so tightly the knuckles were white. “When Richard was fifteen and I was thirteen, Mother committed suicide. Richard blamed Father for it. Richard and Mother were so much alike—and he adored her. I always understood how difficult it must have been for Father, being married to a woman like Mother, but as far as Richard was concerned, Father was a bully who drove her to her death.” Cressida smiled sadly. “Sounds very Shakespearean, doesn't it? ‘Full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.’
“Father remarried and Richard loathed his new wife. Richard met a girl—your mother—and Father loathed her. Then Richard announced that he was going to leave business school and become an actor. I never could decide if he did it as a way of slapping Father in the face, or if he was trying somehow to be loyal to Mother.”
Randa remembered her father standing on an empty stage and saying there was no place like it in the world. “He did it because he loved it,” she said.
“I'm glad to hear that,” said Cressida. “Father cut Richard off, and Richard responded in true Elizabethan style by cutting all of us out of his life. I didn't know when he was married or when you were born. I never knew that his wife had died and he was raising you alone. I wish I had.”
So do I, Randa thought, in spite of herself.
Cressida sat back in her chair. “I don't know what else I can tell you. ”
“We'd like to hear about your … our family,” Susie said. “The history. Like, what part of the country they came from, and how long they've lived here.”
“I believe the Jenningses moved to Louisville from the East Coast sometime in the late 1930s. The Honeycutts were originally from the south and they've been here since the 1870s.”
Susie almost dropped her iced tea. Fortunately, Randa wasn't holding anything. “Your mother's maiden name was Honeycutt?” she asked carefully. “Not Venable?”
“No. I've never heard of any branch of the family called Venable. The Honeycutts owned an old opera house in the South, but they sold it sometime after the Civil War. That's how you and I got saddled with the names Cressida and Miranda. The company of actors who bought the theater named their children after Shakespearean characters. Cornelia Honeycutt, our ancestress and clearly a sadist, was so charmed by the idea that she took it over for her own family, and, God help us, we've been doing it ever since.”
Randa's heart was beating hard now. “Was the opera house in Massonville, Georgia?” Randa asked.
“I'm not sure of the town,” Cressida said. “But Georgia rings a bell. The one who would have known was Richard. He did a lot of research into Mother's family. I think he even went to see that old theater once.”