Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  CHAPTER 2

  Sometimes Harriet wondered what it would be like to have siblings. When she was younger, about nine, she had devoted several pages in her notebook to speculation on that topic.

  IF I HAD A SISTER WE COULD TALK AT NIGHT AFTER WE WERE IN BED. WE COULD DISCUSS OUR PARENTS BEHIND THEIR BACKS, WHETHER THEIR MARRIAGE WAS A SATISFYING ONE, AND IF NOT, HOW THEY COULD IMPROVE IT, AND ALSO WHAT THEY MIGHT BE GIVING US FOR CHRISTMAS AND WHERE IT MIGHT BE HIDDEN.

  But it was clear that a sister was not ever going to materialize in her life, or a brother, either, except for the Christian Children’s Fund child in an orphanage in Cambodia, whose photograph was thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the kitchen. Harriet was glad her parents sent him money so he could have schoolbooks, but she didn’t think he qualified at all as a brother even though her parents tried to pass him off on her that way. And she wished the orphanage where he lived had a unisex beauty parlor because he had a very rectangular-looking haircut and it was quite unflattering.

  Without siblings, Harriet relied heavily on the telephone for communication. She felt very fortunate to have a phone in the hall outside her bedroom. It had been installed there for Ole Golly years before so she could call an ambulance if baby Harriet had an attack of appendicitis or poison ivy in the middle of the night. But the telephone had a very long, curled-up cord. So Harriet could stretch it into her room to talk to her friends Sport and Janie in privacy. And Ole Golly, when she had still lived in the yellow bedroom across the hall, could stretch it into her bedroom and talk to her mother, Mrs. Golly, who lived in Far Rockaway. Later, after Ole Golly had met George Waldenstein and added romance to her life last year, Harriet supposed she had stretched the cord and talked to him, too, late at night.

  Though her spying abilities had become quite sophisticated by then, Harriet had never spied or eavesdropped on Ole Golly and Mr. Waldenstein during their courtship, except for one time when she had been curious about kissing. If she had paid more attention, had spied more industriously, she might not have been quite so surprised when they announced their engagement.

  Harriet was glad that no one had thought to remove the third-floor telephone after Ole Golly had become Mrs. Waldenstein and moved to Montreal. Often in the evening Harriet talked to her friends. Tonight she called Sport.

  “Sport? Are you busy?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Of course I’m busy. I made lasagna for dinner. It takes forever to get a lasagna casserole clean. I’m soaking it for the second time.”

  Harriet sighed. Sport’s father, Matthew Rocque, was a writer. He was very good at writing but hopeless at any domestic task, so Sport had been in charge of cooking and cleaning and even the household budget for several years. Once Harriet had thought about asking Cook to prepare extra meals that they could freeze and deliver once a week to Sport’s apartment, sort of a Meals on Wheels for the not particularly elderly. Then she had remembered that the apartment was on the fourth floor, with no elevator. And she remembered, too, that Sport took a certain pride in his cooking.

  Quite recently Sport had acquired a stepmother. But apparently he wasn’t ready to give up control of his household.

  “Why doesn’t Kate cook, Sport?” Harriet asked.

  “She will, sometimes. We’re still working out the details of that. There will be a lot of compromises,” Sport explained. “But for now, I’m still in charge of the meals.”

  “I do not understand one bit why people get married,” Harriet said.

  “Love,” Sport replied, as if the answer were obvious.

  “But—” Harriet began, and then stopped. Sport was not the person to answer her questions about love. And she knew she’d never want to discuss it with her parents. She decided she would ask Ole Golly, who of course would be an expert, having just gotten married a few months before.

  “Well, I wanted to tell you that I have a lot of plans for tomorrow.” Harriet took a piece of paper from her pocket and looked at the list she’d been making.

  “Me too. I’ll still be working on this casserole. The cheese got all burned on one side. I think I’ll probably soak it in a mixture of ammonia and water overnight.”

  “Ammonia and water? Isn’t that dangerous?”

  “No, not unless you mix chlorine in. Then it releases a deadly poison gas.”

  “Oh.” Harriet scrunched her nose thinking about it.

  “I’ll wear rubber gloves, though, when I do it. My hands are getting all cruddy from detergent.”

  Harriet wondered briefly, as she had many times before, what life would be like for Sport in seventh grade. The Gregory School, which they had attended together for so many years, didn’t allow boys beyond the sixth grade. So Sport would be starting next month at a different school, and Harriet was very much afraid that the students there would not understand Sport’s commitment to housework and cooking and that they might make fun.

  “What time are you going to be finished in the morning?” she asked him. Then she waited, knowing from the silence that he was calculating.

  Finally he replied. “Ten twenty-five,” he said, “unless anything unusual happens.”

  Again Harriet worried briefly. The students at his new school would have a very hard time understanding Sport, she knew.

  “I’ll call you then, okay?” Harriet told Sport. “I plan to spy on the Feigenbaums tomorrow. Want to come?”

  “I might. Depends.”

  Harriet looked at her list. PREPARE YELLOW BEDROOM. “In the afternoon,” she said, “I’ll be doing some domestic stuff. You might want to help. I have to fix up Ole Golly’s room, because something truly monumental has happened. She’s coming back!”

  “Ole Golly’s coming back?” Sport almost shouted into the telephone. “Out-bloody-standing!”

  Harriet agreed. She said goodbye so Sport could get back to his soaking casserole.

  • • •

  “Harriet, dear?”

  Harriet jumped. Her mother was at her bedroom door. Ordinarily her mother came up to the third-floor bedroom only to give her daughter a good-night kiss. But by then Harriet was always already in bed, and her things were neatly put away: her notebook inside the old toy box, her projects and charts and lists in her desk drawers. Harriet was a very organized person. Of course, spies had to be. It wouldn’t do for a spy to lose things, or to mix them together.

  But tonight her mother appeared earlier than usual, and Harriet, having taken a bath and changed into her pajamas, was sprawled on the floor working on her time line. It was unrolled, stretched across the rug. At least, Harriet thought gratefully, she hadn’t yet tacked it to the wall. She intended to do that eventually, and she was fairly certain her mother would not be thrilled.

  “My goodness!” Mrs. Welsch said when she entered the room. “Harriet, you are such a busy little bee! Whatever are you working on now?”

  Harriet sighed and wondered whether she could hunch her body over in a way that would conceal the time line. But her body was only a little more than five feet long, and her time line was considerably longer than that. Her time line was about the same length as a lying-down professional basketball player. There was no way to conceal it.

  So she did the next best thing. She lifted the corner of the toy box where it weighted one end of her work. The paper popped loose, and Harriet watched as the time line magically curled itself up.

  “I’m studying how springs work,” Harriet told her mother pleasantly. It was a lie. Spies often lied.

  “Aren’t you clever, darling! Have you thought about examining your bedspring?” Mrs. Welsch crossed the room, lifted the edge of the blue bedspread, and examined the construction of Harriet’s bed. She looked puzzled for a moment. Then she said, “Oh. It’s not visible. Well, that’s why they’re called innersprings, I guess.”

  Harriet replaced the rubber band around her time line and put it in her desk drawer. She went to her bed, pulled the blue spread all the way down, and climbed in. “By the way,
I don’t mind that you’re going to Paris,” she told her mother.

  “We’ll be back in November, dear,” her mother said, smoothing Harriet’s hair. “And won’t it be lovely for you, having Miss Golly back? I know you’ve missed her.”

  “She probably wishes we could go to Paris with you.”

  Mrs. Welsch looked startled at the thought. “My goodness,” she said. “That never occurred to us, dear.”

  “I don’t want to go to Paris. I can’t pronounce most of the words, even the so-called easy ones. Like oeuf or oeil. Who makes words with three vowels in a row? It should be illegal.”

  Her mother smiled. “A lot of things are different in France,” she said. “They even let dogs into restaurants. Imagine! I’m not sure I’ll like that. I wonder if they have a no-dogs section.”

  “Well, Ole Golly wouldn’t like a restaurant with dogs in it, I can tell you that! She would probably speak very, very harshly to the waiter,” Harriet said. “But she did say that she would like to travel.

  “I think that’s partly why she married Mr. Waldenstein,” Harriet confided. “So that she could go to Montreal.”

  “Harriet, dear?”

  “Does Mr. Waldenstein mind that she’s coming back to New York? Daddy would mind if you went to live someplace else, I think.”

  “Harriet, dear? Listen to me a minute.”

  “What?”

  Mrs. Welsch bit her lip. “How shall I say this? Things haven’t worked out well for Miss Golly, dear, in Montreal. And I have, ah, promised her that we will never mention Mr. Waldenstein’s name.”

  “But he’s her husband! How can you not ever mention her husband?”

  Mrs. Welsch sighed. “She said to me on the telephone that Mr. Waldenstein has ceased to exist. That we must expunge him from our memory, as she has.”

  Expunge, thought Harriet, and resolved to write it down on her list of strong verbs.

  “In any case”—Mrs. Welsch was using her perky voice again—“isn’t it fortunate for us that just when we need her, she is available! Fate at work, I would say, wouldn’t you, Harriet?”

  Harriet wouldn’t, exactly. For one thing, now she had no one to ask about love. But she nodded politely. “When is she coming? I have to prepare.”

  “Next Tuesday morning. And our plane leaves for Paris Tuesday evening. Goodness, I must prepare, too! The packing! The shopping! I’ll be very busy this weekend, Harriet. Will you be able to manage? Would you like to go to Brooklyn with Cook?”

  Harriet shook her head. It was tempting. But she had so much to do to prepare for Ole Golly. Her mother had no idea.

  “No,” she said sleepily. “I’ll stay here.”

  “Good night, darling,” Harriet’s mother said, and kissed her cheek. “Sleep well.” She turned out the light and tiptoed away.

  Harriet lay silently in the dark for a moment, thinking. Then she turned the light back on, got out of bed, found the key where she kept it hidden, and opened the toy box. She still called it the toy box—still thought of it as the toy box—even though it hadn’t contained toys for many years, not since Harriet had decided to become a spy. The toy box was the only container she owned that could be locked. Her spy notebooks were all inside.

  Kneeling on the floor beside the toy box, Harriet took out her current notebook, a green composition notebook like all the rest. She flipped through it, looking for an empty page. FLOSS, she found on a recent one, and she remembered writing that after a lecture from her dentist, Dr. Van Pelt. She looked at that page for a moment and decided it was boring and unworthy. So she tore it out and threw it into her wastebasket.

  EXPUNGE MR. WALDENSTEIN FROM MY MEMORY, she wrote carefully on a fresh page. But she knew it would be difficult.

  Just there, in the corner of the toy box, was one of her first notebooks. Most of it was about Ole Golly. Although the early notes were babyish things, written in babyish penmanship—not even cursive at first, and not always spelled correctly—she felt nostalgic about them as she reread.

  OLE GOLLY IS SO MEAN, SHE SAYS I HAVE TO LEARN THREE NEW WORDS EVRY DAY. CRUEL, HORRIBEL, WARLIKE, THOSE ARE MY 3 TODAY.

  WHO CARES ABOUT POSCHER. I DON’T. ONLY OLE GOLLY DOES.

  Harriet frowned when she read that one, trying to remember what poscher might be. Perhaps a kind of European oatmeal, like muesli? Then she recalled Ole Golly’s voice: “Harriet, sit up straight. You never know who might be admiring you.” Of course! Posture! Ole Golly had always been a stickler for good posture. She was right, too, Harriet knew now. Sport had actually told her once that he found her ramrod-like posture remarkable.

  On another page, one with notes about Sport, she knew she would find the word ramrod. But she wouldn’t bother searching for that one now. Now was the time to look back over the years with Ole Golly—and the months with Mr. Waldenstein—anticipating the return of one and expunging the memory of the other.

  • • •

  It had been Ole Golly, after all, who had encouraged Harriet’s career as a spy. Harriet had said to her once, when they were sitting in Ole Golly’s yellow bedroom across the hall on a quiet evening, that she wanted to know everything about everything. Some people might have laughed at that ambition. Some people thought an ambition should be finding a cure for cancer, or hitting the home run that wins the World Series. Harriet didn’t think those were dumb ambitions; she just thought they were limited.

  “I want to know everything in the world, everything,” Harriet had announced suddenly. Ole Golly had been reading that evening. She was reading a book called Dostoievsky. It was fat enough that it probably contained everything about everything.

  “I will be a spy,” Harriet had said, and Ole Golly had not laughed or been nonplussed. She had put her book down for a moment and looked thoughtful. Then she had said, “It won’t do you a bit of good to know everything if you don’t do anything with it.” So Harriet had decided not only to be a spy, not only to learn everything about everything, but also to do something with it. She felt now that she had succeeded in some ways. She had become a masterful spy—the many notebooks in her locked toy box were proof of that.

  But she had not always been so masterful. Just last year her notebook had fallen into the hands of her classmates—many of whom were the very people she spied on. The results had been disastrous. But Harriet had learned a great deal from the experience. She did not yet know everything about everything, but you couldn’t expect to when you were not quite twelve. That would come later, Harriet thought, and she looked forward to the moment when she would wake up one morning and realize: I know everything about everything! the way Dostoievsky must have.

  As for doing anything with it, as Ole Golly had advised, Harriet was uncertain. Sometimes she did things with the information she obtained by spying, but they were smallish things. Desire was there, but opportunity was lacking. She sat on the floor with her notebook open and yearned for an opportunity to use her knowledge in a broad and important way.

  A folded paper fell suddenly into Harriet’s lap, right onto her lavender-striped pajamas. She picked it up, recognized it, and smiled. It was the letter that Ole Golly had sent after she had married and moved to Montreal.

  . . . If you’re missing me I want you to know I’m not missing you. Gone is gone. I never miss anything or anyone because it all becomes a lovely memory. I guard my memories and love them, but I don’t get in them and lie down. . . .

  Harriet had memorized that part. She had memorized almost the entire letter. She had even kissed the folded letter several times, and she did so again, kissing it goodbye before replacing it between the pages of the notebook. This time there was no sadness in her kiss, because there was no farewell. Ole Golly was returning.

  Climbing back into her bed after putting the notebook away, Harriet recalled the ending of the letter:

  No more nonsense.

  Ole Golly Waldenstein

  Expunge George Waldenstein, Harriet commanded herself. In her mind she changed
the signature simply to Ole Golly, deleting the last name as a way of expunging. It seemed a strange request—to expunge your husband. Harriet recognized when something seemed peculiar, but then Ole Golly wasn’t like everybody—or anybody—else.

  Harriet turned over into her sleeping position, thinking about her spying plans for the weekend, and in the back of her mind looking forward to Tuesday.

  CHAPTER 3

  Harriet prepared to set out shortly after breakfast on Saturday morning. She had eaten cornflakes and a banana in the kitchen.

  When Cook was there, sometimes Harriet liked to place an order as if she were in a fine restaurant. “I believe I’d like a cheese omelet with fresh parsley snippered on top of it, and a little crisp bacon on the side, please,” she would say. Harriet enjoyed the look on Cook’s face when she placed an order.

  “We’re out of that,” Cook would say, “and you get scrambled or nothing.”

  But there was no fun in playing fine restaurant on Cook’s days off, so Harriet always ate cornflakes and a banana.

  From her bedroom, as she gathered her spying equipment after breakfast, she could hear her mother talking on the phone downstairs in the library.

  “No, she’s just fine with it, Sylvia,” Mrs. Welsch was saying. Harriet knew they were talking about her. Conversations that used she were usually about Harriet.

  Sylvia was Mrs. Welsch’s best friend, Sylvia Connelly, who lived in a very fancy apartment near Central Park. Harriet didn’t like Sylvia Connelly very much. Sylvia didn’t understand children, in Harriet’s opinion, even though she had two of her own awful boys, twins named Malcolm and Edmund, who went away to a military school where they were learning more than any human should ever know about weapons and warfare. How Mr. and Mrs. Connelly were able to love Malcolm and Edmund was yet one more of the mysteries Harriet had not been able to solve.