The children were permitted real grown-up duties such as making beds, except for changing sheets which wasn’t necessary often anyway, for a little wrinkle or bits of grime in bedclothing never killed anybody. An Irish girl named Mary did the hard work, to a constant flow of instructions from Grandma.

A fascinating feature of Grandma’s residence was that it was one of fourteen three-story frame houses, all exactly alike, and joined together at their foundations. The cellars had connecting doors, allowing the exploratory young visitors to wander almost a full block in an underground labyrinth of coal bins, jam closets, gray furnaces with swarming pipes, wood piles, broken furniture, trunks, and rat traps.

The backyards of these houses were separated by high weather-beaten picket fences. Here were garbage pails, ash heaps, clothesline props, the lines sagging constantly with grayish washings.

Lean tomcats scurried about, city cats with business on their minds, so they tolerated no petting. A tramp from the Union Station train yards would rest occasionally on a sloping cellar door, eating his handout. Grandma declared that Cleveland tramps were not as high-class or as educated as the London Junction tramps, who usually paid their way either in wood chopping or instructive conversation about the government.

In the basement of Grandma’s house lived Uncle Wally, Grandma’s oldest brother, who had suddenly come home from several years’ wandering in the Far West. His daughters and sons in Elmville refused to take him in because, they claimed, he had turned Unitarian in his travels, so he took up quarters at Grandma’s. He indicated his intention of staying, by thoughtfully taking charge of the furnace the very hour he arrived, then mending the washing machine, almost the last lick of work he did, once he was established on a cot in the furnace room. He was sixty-five years old now, and didn’t care much about anything but a warm bed and plenty of coffee. He kept his own coffeepot piping hot always on the furnace. He had a big armchair beside the cot and kept his treasures on the broad sill of the barred cellar window. These treasures consisted of a deck of soiled cards for solitaire, a Holy Bible rusty with age, and a stiff collar which he was saving for his funeral. Under the cot was a slop jar with a pink crocheted lid, a cuspidor, and a tobacco box. When the children prowled through the basement, they found him usually sitting on the bed, hands on his knees, staring at nothing. If they made too much noise he snarled at them, but otherwise paid little attention to the busy life going on around him. Papa’s visits cheered him up, and he usually would say something that would keep Papa chuckling for a long time.

“Martha used to say a man was too dirty for a house. Keep him in the barn or the cellar, she said, and by golly maybe she was right,” he once volunteered philosophically. “Course every man’s bound to have some woman at him, wife or daughter; he might as well get used to it or clear out like I did. The thing is to hold on to your temper, keep out of the way, and keep your hat on.”