Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  OLE GOLLY RETURNS. Harriet had written it in two places. First she had written it in her notebook. WE MUST NEVER SPEAK OF HER UNFORTUNATE MONTHS IN MONTREAL, she had added as a reminder and an instruction to herself. Of course, that meant the time in Montreal would remain a mystery. And to Harriet, to a spy like Harriet, mysteries cried out to be solved. She would have to curb her spying-and-solving impulse. She could hardly, however, control her curiosity.

  A NEW CHAPTER OF OUR LIFE TOGETHER BEGINS, she had written finally across the top of a fresh page before putting the notebook away.

  Then she had written the same headline—OLE GOLLY RETURNS—in highly decorated letters on the next-to-last page of her time line. Many pages before, she could see OLE GOLLY ARRIVES as the major news from her earliest days; then, not so very far back, OLE GOLLY MARRIES AND MOVES TO MONTREAL was printed in somber penmanship, the way an obituary might be written.

  Other news would be added on this current page. BEGINS SEVENTH GRADE would appear in another two weeks. But for now the return of Catherine Golly was top headline, even though (Harriet looked again impatiently) no taxi had appeared yet.

  “Dear?” Her mother called from a lower floor. “Cook says lunch is almost ready.”

  Harriet unweighted the time line and let it curl itself into a cylinder. She went across the small hallway to be certain once again that everything was ready. She had announced on Saturday afternoon that she planned to repaint Ole Golly’s room to spruce up the brightness of its yellow walls, but Harriet’s parents reminded her that they had had the room professionally repainted after Ole Golly moved out because they planned to use it as a guest room. They had paid eight hundred dollars, they said, to a painter named Brian Cleary, and the room had not been used since. That had been only about ten months ago.

  So Harriet had decided she didn’t want to repaint the room anyway. But she did want the room to look special. She bought yellow flowers at a store around the corner and placed them in a small blue pitcher. They were still upright and fresh on Ole Golly’s bureau. Beside them was a small dish of chocolate kisses. Harriet had a feeling that perhaps while they were eating the candy together, the subject of kisses in general could be brought up and the topic of love introduced without mentioning Mr. Waldenstein’s name.

  She had gone downstairs to the library and selected books she knew were Ole Golly’s favorites: Dostoievsky, Wordsworth, and Shakespeare: The Complete Plays, which was very thick and heavy and full of footnotes. Those books were neatly stacked on the table beside the rocking chair. Harriet had added her paperback Scrabble dictionary to the pile, along with a Hallmark card that said GOOD LUCK IN YOUR NEW HOME. The card had a picture of a small cottage with a thatched roof and smoke curling from its chimney—not exactly the right kind of picture, but it was the only new-home card Harriet could find at the corner pharmacy. Carefully she had signed it, after a long period of thought, No nonsense, Harriet the Spy.

  She lifted a corner of the bedspread and determined that the clean sheets were still clean. She opened the door of the closet and determined that the neat row of empty wooden coat hangers was still hanging in an orderly way. She turned on all the lamps to be certain that no lightbulbs needed replacing, and then she turned them all off again. Finally she examined the framed print of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers that had always hung on the yellow wall opposite the window. Harriet took out her retractable tape measure and determined that the frame was askew by a sixteenth of an inch. Carefully she straightened it. Then she looked around the room one more time, decided it was perfect, and headed down the stairs for lunch just as the taxi pulled up to the Welsches’ front door.

  • • •

  Harriet burst through the door and dashed down the front steps to the sidewalk. Ole Golly was leaning into the cab having an argument with the driver.

  “‘He that filches from me my good name robs me of that which not enriches him,’” she was saying in a firm, somewhat arrogant, slightly angry voice. She handed the driver some money.

  “What’s that, a fortune cookie message?” the taxi driver asked sarcastically.

  “I am waiting for my change, young man. It’s Shakespeare. Iago in act three, scene three of Othello. You would do well to improve your reading habits.”

  The driver gave her some coins. Ole Golly looked at them carefully. “And your driving habits, too,” she said. “You were well over the speed limit until the light at Eighty-seventh Street.”

  The driver scowled, leaned over, slammed the door, and sped away, leaving Ole Golly standing beside her suitcase on the curb with the coins in her hand. Harriet threw her arms around her. It was not easy, because Ole Golly was—as she always had been—wrapped in layers of tweed, even in August. She was also wearing the sturdy, sensible shoes Harriet remembered and a rust-colored felt hat with a small feather, and she was carrying a large brown purse.

  “You’re back! You’re back!”

  “Disentangle yourself, Harriet. That man drove away without waiting for his tip, not that he deserved one.” Ole Golly put the coins into her purse. “Please be so kind as to help me with my valise.”

  “I have so much to tell you! My parents are going to France! Well, of course, you know that already, don’t you? What else? Oh yes, Sport’s father got married, imagine that! I cannot figure out why! But his wife is nice and lets Sport cook! Oh dear, I’m sorry, maybe I shouldn’t speak of marriage—”

  Harriet struggled up the front steps with the heavy suitcase. Ole Golly was greeting her parents in the front hall, the three of them quite businesslike and polite.

  “I’m making a time line, and you’re on it! And school starts very soon. I think my homeroom teacher will be Mr. Grenville. Remember him? He’s the one who did an Elvis imitation at the teachers’ assembly last year. I told you about it. It was so bad. And guess what, Ole Golly, Sport said he would make some oatmeal cookies, your favorite, and he’s bringing them over this afternoon! And—”

  But no one was listening, and Harriet realized she was yammering. Cook was calling from the foot of the stairs that lunch was getting cold, Mrs. Welsch was describing the apartment in Paris, Ole Golly was saying in a huff that New York taxi drivers were even worse than they had been last time she was here, and Mr. Welsch was glancing at the folded newspaper in his hand and saying something about interest rates and the Federal Reserve. They were all yammering. It didn’t matter. Happily Harriet set the suitcase down on the hall floor and followed everyone into the dining room for lunch.

  • • •

  “See? OLE GOLLY RETURNS. Isn’t the penmanship wonderful? I used an Ultra Fine Sharpie. This is the most current, up-to-date part of my time line,” Harriet was explaining to Sport.

  “Why aren’t I on it? Couldn’t you add SIMON ROCQUE BRINGS OATMEAL COOKIES?”

  They were sprawled on the bedroom floor. Across the hall Ole Golly was unpacking. They could hear her feet moving across the room from suitcase to closet. They could hear the wooden coat hangers being lifted, arranged, and replaced.

  “Not important enough. You have to get a sense of what’s important, Sport. The only things that you put on a time line are things that might change the course of events to come. Oatmeal cookies have never, ever done that.”

  “The invention of gunpowder has.”

  “Yes, that would be one. I would have put that on if I were doing the whole world.”

  “The Black Plague.”

  “Yes, that, too. If I were doing the world.”

  “Starting seventh grade.”

  “Now you’re getting it. That affects my part of the world. I’ll put that on when it happens. And I did put MATTHEW ROCQUE GETS MARRIED. But that should really have gone on your time line, if you had one, Sport, because he’s your father.”

  “Starting seventh grade would go on mine, too,” Sport pointed out. Harriet noticed that he had a glum expression on his face.

  “Are you worried about going to a new school?” she asked him. Privately she had be
en worrying a lot on his behalf.

  “No.” But Harriet, trained observer that she was, could tell that it was a no filled with bravado and that Sport was actually very nervous at the prospect of attending such a large school. She didn’t blame him. The Gregory School, which she and Sport had both gone to for years, was so small and intimate it was like a family—with the quarrels and quirks (Ah! Two Q words for Scrabble, Harriet realized with pleasure) of a family, but like a family, there were hugs and jokes and a lot of shared memories, too.

  Now for Sport school would be complete strangeness, among people who wouldn’t understand him. It would be like living in a foreign country. It would be like—

  “Ole Golly?” Harriet called suddenly. The footsteps paused in the yellow bedroom across the hall. “Can you come here?”

  Ole Golly appeared in Harriet’s bedroom door and looked down at Harriet and Sport. She had taken off some of her layers of tweed after lunch, and now she was down to a voluminous jumper over a white blouse clasped at the neck with a thick gold brooch. With her hat off, her familiar hair, bunched in the back into the unfashionable bun Harriet had always loved, was visible.

  Ole Golly frowned at them. “Might I remind you that bellowing is a less than effective way to summon someone?”

  “You did bellow, Harriet,” Sport said. “Anything louder than a politely raised voice is a bellow.”

  “Sorry,” Harriet sighed. She was thinking that bellow might go on her list of strong verbs, to which she had just that morning added a new favorite: lunge. She looked up at Ole Golly.

  “I just wanted to ask you something, because Sport and I were talking about school. He’s going to a new school this fall, Ole Golly, and it won’t be at all like the Gregory School. In fact, it might even be populated with hoodlums and criminals, so of course he’s scared blue—”

  “I didn’t say any of that, Harriet,” Sport told her angrily. “I didn’t say one bit of it.”

  “I read minds.”

  Sport glared at her but couldn’t think of a retort because he knew it was true. Harriet could read his mind.

  “Anyway,” Harriet went on, ignoring Sport’s glare, “since you have quite recently done the same thing, Ole Golly—”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Now Ole Golly was glaring, too.

  “Meaning you left a very familiar, comfortable place and went off to a new and different place, which you knew nothing about—”

  “About which,” Ole Golly corrected. But she was still glaring.

  “Whatever. And you probably didn’t know what to expect, the way Sport doesn’t, and were very nervous, the way Sport is—”

  “I never said that,” Sport reminded her.

  Harriet shot him a withering glance. Had he perhaps forgotten that she was able to read minds?

  “So,” Harriet continued, “I thought you might be able to give him some heartening advice.”

  Ole Golly simply stared at her.

  “Well,” Harriet pointed out, “he did make you those cookies.”

  “They were excellent, Simon,” Ole Golly said, looking at Sport. “And I am concerned for you, starting out on this new and perhaps frightening enterprise.”

  “Heartening advice,” Harriet whispered loudly to her as a reminder.

  “Be aware,” Ole Golly said to Sport after a pause, “that things are not always what they seem. Adjustments must be made. But somehow we manage to muddle through.”

  Muddle? Not a very strong verb, Harriet thought. And not particularly heartening.

  “‘Thanks to the human heart by which we live,’” Ole Golly concluded. “That’s a quote from Wordsworth. Bear it in mind.” She turned to go back to her room.

  “Harriet,” she said over her shoulder, “I need three more coat hangers. They need not be wood. And a one-hundred-watt bulb for the lamp beside the chair where I read. Sixty watts is inadequate for reading.”

  When she had gone, Harriet and Sport sat together silently for a moment. “She’s changed,” Sport said at last. “Something’s different about her.”

  Harriet was thinking the same thing, though she didn’t want it to be true. She wanted absolutely nothing to be changed about Ole Golly. “Her hair?” she suggested. “It’s a little different, I think.”

  Sport shook his head. “Something more on the inside. She seems sad.”

  Harriet stared at him, knowing he was right. Ole Golly did seem sad, and just at the time when Harriet felt so happy. Harriet didn’t want Ole Golly to be sad, ever. She chewed on her lower lip, something she often did when she was thinking. Then she marched into Ole Golly’s room.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Harriet demanded. It needed to be asked.

  “You may knock before entering my room,” Ole Golly replied evenly. She was sitting in her chair, staring out the window. No book, no knitting, just staring.

  Knock? thought Harriet. That’s a new rule. But Harriet was good at following rules. When she felt like it, at least.

  “Is something wrong? Besides the lightbulb and the coat hangers?” Harriet tried again.

  “‘Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, or a kiss too long.’”

  “What?”

  “George Macdonald.”

  “Why are you acting so strange?” Harriet was getting exasperated. She didn’t like having to repeat herself.

  “I just need some time alone, Harriet. Everyone does. Even you and Sport. Right now you are spending your time together. So I will take some time alone. Now if you don’t mind . . .”

  And with that, Harriet turned on her heel and showed herself out. But she purposely left the door open so Ole Golly would have to get up from her chair to close it if she wanted to be completely alone.

  “Since when does Ole Golly need time to herself?” she asked Sport. “She’s here to take care of me, after all. That is why she lives here, in my house, across the hall from my room, sharing my phone.”

  Then something else caught Harriet’s attention.

  “Sport?” Harriet said, leaning forward. “Look up there toward the window. Lean your head that way. I need to examine your face.”

  Sport frowned, but he obeyed, raising his face toward the light of the window.

  “I think . . .” Harriet took her magnifying glass from her pocket. She held it to Sport’s upper lip. “Yes, it’s true.”

  “What’s true?” Sport asked suspiciously. He pulled away from her scrutiny.

  “Hairs. Growing between your mouth and nose.”

  “Hairs?”

  “At least four. Maybe five.”

  Harriet put the magnifying glass back in her pocket and picked up her pencil. She began to write something just below OLE GOLLY RETURNS. “This puts you in my time line, Sport. Oatmeal cookies didn’t do it, but this does. This will certainly affect the course of future events.”

  “What do you mean, this?” Sport crouched down and squinted to see what Harriet was writing so neatly.

  SIMON ROCQUE ENTERS PUBERTY

  Sport fingered his upper lip in dismay. Harriet underlined the sentence and they both stared at it. Across the hall they heard Ole Golly sit down in the rocking chair. They heard her give a deep sigh, as if disappointment had moved into the yellow room with her.

  “Did she say something?” Sport whispered to Harriet. Harriet shook her head.

  “It was just a sigh,” she whispered. “She never used to sigh. She considered sighing a waste of breath.”

  Harriet released the time line so that it rolled itself up again and made space on the floor of her room.

  “Harriet,” Sport said, “I gotta go. I’m making a pot roast for dinner and it has to go into the oven by four.”

  “Send out for Chinese,” Harriet ordered. “This is more important.”

  “No, I’m going,” Sport said firmly. “Bye, Ole Golly!” he called a little nervously, and headed for the stairs.

  “I have to shave,” he told Harriet, and off he went, leaving her alone, ac
ross from the yellow room with the now tightly closed door and the puzzling sound of sighs.

  CHAPTER 5

  Harriet kept the Feigenbaums’ house under almost constant surveillance from her bedroom window. She used the small binoculars that her parents took for bird-watching every time they were invited to the Connellys’ summer home on Nantucket. Harriet had gone with them for one of those weekends, but she hadn’t enjoyed it much. Malcolm and Edmund Connelly had been there, and they kept reciting a limerick about Nantucket that Harriet had not wanted to hear.

  But she was glad now of the bird-watching binoculars. She sat in her desk chair, which she had moved near the window, and watched the Feigenbaums’ house. She thought that if she saw Rosarita in a window, she might wave in a casually friendly way.

  People who looked like patients came and went, each of them ringing the bell and speaking into the intercom beside the door as Harriet had. The door opened and closed again and again, and Harriet carefully noted the activity in her notebook.

  TALL PREGNANT WOMAN, BAD HAIR DAY, ARRIVES BY CAB, ENTERS HOUSE 9:55 A.M. LEAVES 11 A.M., KLEENEX CLUTCHED IN HAND, WALKS TO CORNER, DISAPPEARS.

  OVERWEIGHT MAN WEARING BLUE SHORT-SLEEVED SHIRT, CARRYING NEWSPAPER, ARRIVES 2 P.M., ENTERS HOUSE, LEAVES 2:45 P.M., APPEARS INDECISIVE, THEN WALKS WEST TOWARD PARK. NO LONGER CARRYING PAPER.

  Her notes and her observations were meticulous. They were also, Harriet realized after a while, boring. But spies on surveillance were often required to do boring things. Harriet yawned. Perhaps things would be more stimulating outside.

  Still no action at the Feigenbaums’. Sitting on her front stoop, she turned to the Ole Golly section of her notebook.

  SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH OLE GOLLY. SHE USED TO SAY THAT PEOPLE WHO DON’T DO ANYTHING DON’T THINK ANYTHING, SO THERE’S NOTHING TO THINK ABOUT THEM. BUT NOW IT’S OLE GOLLY WHO DOESN’T DO OR SAY ANYTHING. SHE SITS AND STARES. I DID THAT FOR A LITTLE WHILE LAST YEAR AFTER SHE LEFT. AT FIRST I DIDN’T READ OR DO MY MATH. I EVEN NEGLECTED MY SPY ROUTE—BUT ONLY FOR A SHORT PERIOD. IS THAT WHY OLE GOLLY WANTS TO BE ALONE ALL THE TIME? IS SHE SAD?