Cheaper by the Dozen

she had reddish brown hair and a reddish brown temper. She, her husband, and their grown children, whom we worshipped, lived a few blocks from us in Providence. Aunt Anne was an accomplished pianist and gave music lessons at her house at 26 Cabot Street. Dad thought it would be nice if all of us learned to play something. Dad admitted he was as green as any valley when it came to music, but he had a good ear and he liked symphonies.
    Aunt Anne must have sensed almost immediately that we had no talent. She knew, though, that any such admission would have a depressing effect on Dad, who took it for granted that his children had talent for everything. Consequently, Aunt Anne stuck courageously to a losing cause for six years, in an unusual display of devotion and fortitude above and beyond the regular call of family duty.
    When she finally became convinced of the hopelessness of teaching us the piano, she shifted us to other instruments. Although we had no better success, the other instruments at least were quieter than the piano and, more important, only one person could play them at a time.
    Our Anne was shifted to the violin, Ernestine to the mandolin, and Martha and Frank to the 'cello. It was awful at home when we practiced, and Dad would walk smirkingthrough the house with wads of cotton sticking prominently from his ears.
    "Never mind," he said, when we told him we didn't seem to be making any progress. "You stick with it. You'll thank me when you're my age."
    Unselfishly jeopardizing her professional reputation as a teacher, Aunt Anne always allowed each of us to play in the annual recitals at her music school. Usually we broke down in the middle, and always had a demoralizing effect on the more talented children, and on their parents in the audience.
    To salvage what she could of her standing as a teacher, Aunt Anne used to tell the audience before we went on stage that we had only recently shifted from the piano to stringed instruments. The implication, although not expressed in so many words, was that we had already mastered the piano and were now branching out along other musical avenues.
    Just before we started to play, she affixed mutes to our strings and whispered:
    "Remember, your number should be played softly, softly as a little brook tinkling through a still forest."
    The way we played, it didn't tinkle. As Dad whispered to Mother at one recital: "If I heard that coming from the back fence at night, I'd either report it to the police or heave shoes at it."

    Aunt Anne was good to us and we loved her and her family, but like Dad she insisted on having her own way. While we reluctantly accepted Dad's bossing as one of the privileges of his rank as head of the family, we had no intention of accepting it from anybody else, including his oldest sister.
    After we moved to Montclair, Aunt Anne came to stay with us for several days while Mother and Dad were away on a lecture tour. She made it plain from the start that she was not a guest, but the temporary commander-in-chief. She even used the front stairs, leading from the front hall to the second floor, instead of the back stairs, which led from the kitchen to a hallway near the girls' bathroom. None of us was allowed to use the front stairs, because Dad wanted to keep the varnish on them looking nice.
    "Daddy will be furious if he comes home and finds you've been using his front stairs," we told Aunt Anne.
    "Nonsense," she cut us off. "The back stairs are narrow and steep, and I for one don't propose to use them. As long as I'm here, I'll use any stairs I have a mind to. Now rest your features and mind your business."
    She sat at Dad's place at the foot of the table, and we resented this, too. Ordinarily, Frank, as the oldest boy, sat in Dad's place, and Anne, as the oldest girl, sat at Mother's. We also disapproved of Aunt Anne's blunt criticism of how we kept our bedrooms, and some of the changes she made in the family routine.
    "What do you do, keep pigeons in here?" she'd say when she walked into the bedroom shared by Frank and Bill. "I'm coming back in fifteen minutes, and I want to find this room in apple-pie order."
    And: "I don't care what time your regular bedtime is. As long as I'm in charge, we'll do things my way. Off with you now."
    Like Grandma and Dad, Aunt Anne thought that all Irishmen were shiftless and that Tom Grieves was the most shiftless of all Irishmen. She told him so at least once a day, and Tom was scared to death of