Piano Lessons in Marble Hill

 

It would be perfectly fine for the 12-year old girl to ride the trolley across the 225^th Street Bridge. By 1940, she knew the city well and could glare fiercely at anyone who scared her.   

During those years her mother was chronically ill and often disappeared into hospitals and sanitariums. But Rose was around often enough to decide that her only child, Gloria, should have piano lessons, and she went about finding the right teacher.

That turned out to be Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde. Born in England in 1864, Mrs. Wilde immigrated to the U.S. in 1894. There, she taught piano and voice for decades.

Around 1910, Mrs. Wilde and her family moved from Brooklyn to an apartment in Marble Hill, N.Y.

New York, 1911
Mrs. Wilde, unknown woman, Elsie 
& Muriel, seated
(courtesy of the family)

Marble Hill is such an evocative name. One imagines Primrose Hill in London, with its panoramic views. Mrs. Wilde’s Marble Hill was a hilly hodge-podge of narrow streets lined with houses and apartment buildings. Except for the commercial district along 225^th Street, near the subway and trolley stations, the neighborhood stayed pretty quiet. It had its own charm.

There is a strange twist in the history of Marble Hill. Originally, in the time of the Lenape Indians who inhabited Manhattan until the early 1600s, a narrow creek, which the Dutch named “Spuyten Duyvil,” flowed around the northern tip of the island between the Hudson and Harlem Rivers.

In 1886, the city fathers decided to widen and reroute the creek to accommodate a growing number of barges and tugs. Over nine years, as laborers constructed the Harlem Ship Canal, Marble Hill was transformed into an island and subsequently, through the miracle of landfill, became part of The Bronx.

Politically, it remains affiliated with Manhattan. Marble Hill’s residents vote in Manhattan elections.

Amusingly, in 1939 the Bronx Borough President, James T. Lyons, planted a Bronx flag at the highest point of Marble Hill and claimed it for his borough.

Everyone laughed and the Times declared Marble Hill to be The Bronx’s Sudetenland.  

Trolley tracks on the 225th Street Bridge 

Gloria, her parents, and her grandmother lived in Inwood, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. In order to get to Marble Hill, Gloria rode the trolley north on the lower level of the swing bridge that crossed the Harlem Ship Canal. Debarking on the other side, she’d walk a few blocks to Mrs. Wilde’s apartment.

Every spring, Mrs. Wilde hosted a piano recital to show off her students. She printed programs, so I know that Gloria performed pieces by Chopin and Grieg, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue.

Program for Mrs. Wilde's recital, 1942. 
On the left, Elsie Wilde performs a song by Clara Edwards;
 on the right, Gloria Stromberg performs Gershwin.

The recitals were held in Mrs. Wilde’s living room. Perhaps you’re wondering how all of the pupils and their guests squeezed in.

Mrs. Wilde didn’t teach on a grand, not even an upright. Her piano, a spinet, was small with extra-short keys. Spinets became popular during the Depression. Though eminently affordable, they fell short of the rich tone of grand pianos.  

In addition to the spinet, the room held a chest of drawers and a couch. As many chairs as possible were rounded up for the audience. 

45 Marble Hill Avenue

While she managed everything with aplomb, things had been bumpy since Henriette Victoria Hodson Wilde sailed from England to America in 1894 at the age of thirty.

She arrived with her six-year old daughter, Elsie, and the man who would soon become her mercurial common-law husband, William (Willoughby) Wilde. He traveled under “William White.”

Henriette and Willoughby were met by a friend, Francis Wilde. He went by Frank. The two men were not related. 

They had a plan, however, so everyone set out for North Adams, Mass., where Willoughby had been hired to perform as an organist or choirmaster, possibly accompanied by Mrs. Wilde’s voice.

But Mrs. Wilde might have been indisposed because her second daughter, Muriel, was born in North Adams.  

Before long they were off to Oskaloosa, Iowa, where Willoughby had secured a position as the organist and choirmaster at the First Presbyterian Church. He also directed the new philharmonic society in town.

Mrs. Wilde became very popular in Oskaloosa. She gave vocal performances at musicales, women’s clubs, graduations, and churches. The local papers showered her with praise: “artistic,” “delightful,” “sweet and dainty,” “the gem of the evening.”

Meanwhile, Frank worked in bookbinding or real estate. Sometimes he sold clothing and fruit.

In 1895, the family moved to Reading, PA, where Sidney was born. Before long they were off to Lebanon, PA, as the family began its zigzag journey back east, ending in Marble Hill.

Willoughby S. Wilde surrounded by members of
his chorus for an operetta, "The Ballet of the Seasons,"
performed in Reading, PA, 1903.

Of course, Mrs. Wilde’s students did not know that the British lady in her mid-70s had inhabited far more American cities and towns than they could imagine.

The teacher possessed her own odd story and so did my mother, who took piano lessons for at least ten years and insisted that my brother and I do the same. But we never heard her play a note. 

Mrs. H. Victoria Wilde and Gloria held their years close.

They have gone away but the mysteries remain.

 

*Deepest gratitude to Tom and Liz, who opened up their memories and files.

 

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Growing Up With John P. Marquand

John P. Marquand by Gardner Cox, 1955
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of Phyllis B. Cox

Sometimes when my sons were young, bursting with a story about something exciting, I would reply, “Really my dear, really!”

Except I’d say it like this: “Rally my dear, ra-a-a-ally!”

The reply never failed to annoy them. Right now, relatively late in the game, I would like to apologize because it is, indeed, very annoying.

It would have been better, perhaps, to know where “ra-a-a-ally” came from, but I could not recall. It was imprinted on my brain, something I’d read many years earlier, which stuck.

But just a few weeks ago, I discovered the source while scanning the shelves for a comfortable old shoe sort of book.

During the sixties and seventies, my parents owned a modest beach house on Gardiner’s Bay in East Hampton. At the time, East Hampton was relatively modest, too. There was no Elie Tahari, J. Crew and Ralph Lauren, but there was an A&P, a grocery store with a donut machine, two pharmacies, a nineteenth-century windmill, and a movie theater with a single screen.

Best of all was the bookstore run by the Ladies Village Improvement Society. Used books, of course. And a wonderful range—bestsellers, Book-of-the-Month Club, and lots of novels that were popular during the forties and after the war.

As the historian Joan Shelley Rubin wrote:

On rainy summer afternoons, the inhabitants of the cottages for rent along the New England coast or the lakes of the Midwest sometimes grow restless. Tired of Monopoly and finished with the stack of current fiction imported from  home, they fasten their attention on the well-worn books that, like the mismatched china and frayed rag rugs, furnish the house. Among the faded volumes on the shelves, certain titles turn up with the faithfulness of an old friend . . .

At the LVIS bookstore in East Hampton, one might stumble over the oeuvre of a single author. Such was the case for me and John P. Marquand (1893-1960), who first gained renown for his Mr. Moto series about a Japanese secret agent. Several of these books became films.

Poster for Think Fast, Mr. Moto
1937

During the late 1930s, Marquand turned his attention to the East Coast, portraying patricians, men in particular, struggling with the social chasm opened by World War I. His first such novel, The Late George Apley, a memoir of a Boston Brahmin, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1938.

Marquand proceeded through the 1940s and ’50s, producing well-plotted books about affluent men and women, some with pedigrees, who were navigating cultural pretensions old and new. 

In So Little Time (1943), Jeffrey Wilson, a script doctor, and his wife Madge are driving to a weekend party at the home of Beckie—Madge’s oldest friend—and her husband, Fred.

 

Madge said that Fred and Beckie had such luck, and their old farm in Connecticut was just another example of it. It had simply been an old ramshackle tumbledown place occupied by an Italian family named Leveroni, although the house was one of the dearest old salt-boxes that Beckie had ever seen, whatever a salt-box might be, and it dated back easily to the Revolutionary War. Beckie was the one who saw its possibilities.   

The critics wrote that Marquand was a superb satirist, delivering send-ups of bluebloods like Beckie and Fred who sashayed between New York and Boston, Park Avenue and the Berkshires.

I think the most interesting characteristic of Marquand’s protagonists is how they shift from present to past, and how their memories keep yanking them back to the small towns from whence they came. 

Jeffrey Wilson, for example, realizes that one of the guests at Fred and Beckie’s party is an Edward Murrow-like journalist who covers the war from the frontline.

           “Hello, Walter,” Jeffrey said.

           “Why, I didn’t know you knew Mr. Newcombe,” Beckie said.

Yes, Jeffrey does know Walter Newcombe. They both grew up in Bragg, Massachusetts, and got started working for a curmudgeonly editor at a Boston newspaper; Walter just a squirt in the telegraph room.  

Throughout the weekend, Beckie can’t get over the coincidence, which makes her feel important. She hopes Jeffrey will draw Walter out.

During dinner, Walter’s irrepressible wife is seated beside Jeffrey. She says to him:

 “What’s the matter, dear old playmate? Does the soup taste bad, old chap?”

 “It isn’t the soup,” Jeffrey said. “You ought not to kill a duck and do anything like that to it.” But Mrs. Newcombe was not interested.

 

“Not rahally,” she said, “not rahally, dear old chap.”

So there you are.

At the end of So Little Time, after Jeffrey’s son enlists and announces his engagement to a young woman from a fine family, Jeffrey’s mind flees to the past.

For some reason he was thinking about Madge as she had looked when he had first seen her there by the tennis court at her father’s house, years and years ago when they had been so young. Something had happened to her dress, he remembered. She had wanted a pin for her dress. She had always wanted something from him. He had thought at one time that he had nothing left to give her, but now he knew that there was always something he could give, without desiring to, perhaps, but always something. He could always give her something, and she was the only one.

But Madge is superficial, I remember protesting to myself—too young to grasp the big picture . . .

The Late George Apley, 1937

Sources: So Little Time by John P. Marquand (1943); The Making of Middlebrow Culture by Joan Shelley Rubin (1992).

https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2021/10/growing-up-with-john-p-marquand.html?m=1