Mary Cook - Safe Passage

I was hardly shining at my new job, but I expected things to improve. Meanwhile, I was earning a larger salary than in any job I had held previously. Though we had no definite plans, we certainly had vague expectations of returning to the States again and again. We had found our pattern and felt that our future depended solely on our efforts. In our naïve and rather ignorant minds, we could never have conceived of the rivers of blood and high tide of war that were to sweep between this visit and the next. I realize now that, even though we were in our late twenties, we were not entirely grown up.

This time, the whole of our visit was spent in New York City. But the opera season was on, and we asked for nothing better. However, perhaps Fate had smiled upon us a little too often. Several things went wrong with this third visit. First, we arrived some weeks later than originally planned. Because of the financial upheaval, sailings had been altered and postponed. Of course, in those days there was no air traffic to ease the situation.

Consequently, we arrived almost as Lita and Homer were due to depart on a South African tour, and that gave us only one day with them in New York. They arrived in town with everything packed and ready so that we could spend the whole day together. But it was cruelly short, and the very next day, we went down to the boat to see them off to South Africa.

Louise and I felt thoroughly tearful, and possibly looked it, because I remember Lita whispering, “Don’t cry, girls, or I shall too, and it looks so bad for me to start out on a concert tour in tears!”

Thus adjured, we preserved British calm and waved them away on a separation that lasted another two years.

Secondly, we had arrived when the most glowing nights of the season were already waning, so there was only one Ponselle performance for us. However, this was Gioconda , one of her finest roles, and we had her permission to go around and see her “any time we were at the Met.”

We arrived at the opera house, full of joyful anticipation—only to discover that she was ill. An inconsiderable substitute sang in her place. We sat stolidly and miserably through the performance, and at the end, because we simply had to tell someone, we told the woman sitting beside us how we had come all the way from England, that this was our one Ponselle performance, and we had had to put up with a substitute.

She was full of sympathy and cried, “Isn’t that just too bad! Wasn’t Ponselle singing then? I never noticed.”

We went back to our hotel hating everyone.

However, the next day there appeared an announcement that Ponselle would be singing in a concert at the Metropolitan, well within the limits of our visit. Greatly cheered, we bought our tickets and went.

This was the last time that Louise heard her sing in public, although I heard her twice more in Florence in 1933. I remember everything about her performance that night. She was in black, the dramatic black so suitable for her exotic beauty. With an almost backless dress, she wore long black gloves, and over these, the most magnificent, matching diamond bracelets. If anyone had described that get-up to me without my seeing it, I could have told who wore it.

Afterwards, we went around backstage and were received very kindly. But we were shy, and depressed because she was leaving New York the next day; we could not possibly hear her again. Also, she told us that she thought it was unlikely she would be at Covent Garden that year. It seemed there was not to be an Italian Season. Everything was going wrong for the disillusioned Cooks!

However, there was one tremendously bright spot in that visit: the first American performance of Simon Boccanegra . It was one of the finest productions I ever saw. Tremendously lavish, but everything had a real meaning. No slowly closing doors, unnecessary staircases or the other irrelevant clutter that often passes for “significant” staging today.

The cast included Pinza, unbelievably magnificent in the comparatively secondary role of Fiesco.

I had brought with me to America a specially dressed doll for Claudia Pinza. We had left it for her at the Metropolitan. Toward the end of our visit, we not only received a letter of thanks from her, but on the very last evening of our visit—after a superb Simon Boccanegra —we were taken home by the Pinzas to the Ansonia Hotel, where they then lived, and entertained at supper.

In those days, Pinza knew very little English, and Louise and I, even less Italian. But we all managed somehow, and our last night in New York was very gay and charming.

The next day, or rather late that night, we left New York for home once more. We stayed up on deck for a long while, watching the lights of Manhattan, as we slowly drew away into the darkness. Louise and I talked of returning soon, making tentative plans that were never to materialize. We did, I recollect, feel more than usually sad over our departure, but I am glad we had no inkling of what lay ahead in the years before we were to see New York again.

5

By the time we returned to England, it was still only mid-March and I found myself up against a situation as bleak as the weather. No one could pretend that I was good at my journalistic job. I was not. In addition, I had to live down what was considered my underserved luck for having had a wonderful trip to the States while everyone else had been working hard.

At one point, I told one of my former colleagues at the Law Courts I had made a terrible mistake, and oh, why had I left my safe civil service job with its inevitable pension at sixty?

However, dear Wynne never allowed defeats to depress her.—It was she who said to me on the day France fell, “Isn’t it a relief? Now there’s no one left to let us down.”—On this occasion she said, “Give it one week longer and see if things don’t improve a little.”

So I tried once more. Perhaps that week I made just a few less silly mistakes, and the illustrations were measured up just a little more successfully. Anyway, I stayed.

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