Massonville 1897
When rehearsals began, Ophelia told herself it was only natural that Edward seemed to become distant. The entire weight of Othello rested on his shoulders, and of necessity he was preoccupied with his performance. Furthermore, Mama had set aside an unprecedented two weeks for rehearsing the play and since Ophelia was not going to be a part of the tour, she and Edward were no longer sharing the camaraderie of actors working together on a new production. Every new cast always developed its own jokes based on favorite lines and the “guying” or prank-playing that was a constant in any theater. So when she heard the laughter coming from the stage where the Othello rehearsals were taking place, Ophelia tried hard not to feel left out.
Edward still woke up every morning to help her with the cleaning, but as the rehearsals progressed he grew increasingly distracted. The little games they had played to pass the time stopped; they did not chatter anymore. She tried to engage him in gossip about the Othello rehearsals but that only served to make him irritable. Finally, unable to bear the change she felt in him, Ophelia said boldly, “Your Moor takes up so much of your attention, if I were in love with you, I think I'd be jealous.”
She'd never flirted in quite that way with him before, but his response was a surprise. “Don't be ridiculous,” he snapped.
If he had hit her, she could not have been more hurt. He saw it, and for the first time in a week she had his undivided attention. “Oh my dear, I'm sorry,” he said. “You're right, the play takes all my mind these days, and I'm being horrid. Please forgive me.”
“Perhaps you'd rather not help me in the mornings for a while,” she said.
If she thought his anger had hurt her, now his smile of relief cut far worse. “Would you mind if I didn't?” he asked quickly. “Just until the opening night? Jonathan and I have some new ideas, and we have been working on our scenes privately before the rehearsals.”
“How industrious of you.”
“He knows so much; I learn from him all the time. ”
“Then by all means you do not want to waste your time with me and my mops.”
He didn't even notice as he dashed off that she was being ironic.
From the rumors Ophelia heard flying through the opera house, it seemed that Edward's dedication was worth the cost. The other actors in the cast said he and his older costar might well rival the great Iago and Othello partnerships of the past—the names of Booth and Forrest were bandied about. And everyone in the theater seemed to be fascinated by Jonathan Tyrell.
He was an attractive man, tall and lithe, with sardonic dark eyes, an olive complexion, and just enough snow in his hair to be interesting. In Ophelia's opinion he was a little too florid and too much of a dandy, but even she had to admit that he was gifted as a raconteur.
After the evening's performance—the company was still performing the regular repertoire at night while Othello was being readied—Jonathan would often meet the company for a late supper and regale them all with tales of the great actors he had known. He was a great mimic, and his impersonation of Helena Modjeska bringing an audience to tears by reciting the alphabet in Polish was sheer genius. And Edward was not the only one who sat in worshipful silence when Jonathan described the reaction of the great Edwin Booth when he heard that it was his younger brother, John Wilkes Booth, who had assassinated President Lincoln.
“Booth went down into the cellar of the theater he owned and burned all of his brother's costumes in the furnace,” Jonathan told them, and then proceeded to describe the scene so vividly that Ophelia thought he probably was as brilliant on the stage as everyone said he was. Of course, she could have watched a rehearsal of Othello and judged for herself. But for some reason she never had.
So the opening night was a shock for her. Edward and Jonathan gave what was quite simply the best performance she had ever seen in the opera house. The whole play was well done—one did not expect less from a production staged by Juliet Venable—but when Othello and Iago were together, the stage became brilliantly, almost brutally, alive. Edward with his transparent openness was all passion, and heart, while Jonathan was especially dangerous because a strange tenderness underlay his malice. This was obviously the “new idea” Edward and Jonathan had been rehearsing, and it was effective in a way Ophelia found almost disturbing.
When Jonathan spoke the words “O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock / The meat it feeds on …,” there was a caressing note in his voice, and when he touched Othello's shoulder, the gesture sent a shiver through the entire audience. Edward's agonized response of “O misery!” brought them to the edge of their seats, where they stayed breathlessly until the final curtain.
The two leading men took all of their curtain calls together, in spite of repeated pleas from the house for separate ones. The applause lasted for twenty minutes. Mama stood next to Ophelia backstage and for once she did not look weary. Ophelia found herself thinking back to the sunny mornings not so long ago when she and Edward had dreamed of doing Twelfth Night together and wished she could turn back the clock.
However, clocks go forward, not backward, and no matter how one feels, there is always work to be done. The morning after the triumphal opening of Othello saw Ophelia in the office making last-minute arrangements for the tour. But she was too restless to concentrate, and she decided to take a quick turn around the garden to clear her head. When Ophelia reached the garden gate she found that it was stuck. If it hadn't been, she would have walked right through. She wouldn't have stopped and seen the two figures facing each other as they sat on the bench under her mother's statue, sharing a stolen moment. There was so much longing in the way they leaned toward each other, it was as if they were lovers coming together for an embrace. She recognized them instantly; one was Jonathan Tyrell—and the other was Edward.