Tonight I stopped in to buy a quart of threestar for my Sunday afternoon session with Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. He wrapped it in a brown paper bag and handed it over with a big grin. “For the seeingeye tigress upstairs,” he said. I remarked that that sounded as if he knew the seeingeye tigress upstairs extremely well, which made him laugh. “Oh, she’s one of the great Cross characters,” he said. “You might say I’ve known her for at least a couple of lifetimes.” Something in his voice suggested knowledge in the biblical sense, and I found myself wondering how many of the elderly-and not so elderly-men Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz knows are past lovers. Whenever I see the shy, shadowy Lerner Chusovich, who smokes our eels and sometimes eats with Klaus, he speaks of our landlady with tender yearning. Why ever she might choose a man, it wouldn’t be for anyone else’s reasons. She is a law unto herself. As the upstairs toilet is in a separate room from the upstairs bathroom, I often use the upstairs bathroom because it has a shower head over the bath, and I prefer a shower to a bath any day.
