My widowed landlady wept regularly; day and night, she shuffled around in an unraveling terry-cloth bathrobe. The divorcée was a big-breasted, take-charge sort of woman; it wasn’t her fault that she reminded me of my bossy aunt Muriel. The five-year-old, Siegfried, had a sly, demonic way of staring at me; he ate a soft-boiled egg for breakfast every morning—including the eggshell.
