Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  But she had gotten a brief glimpse of Morris Feigenbaum at work with a patient. He sat there. He kept a notebook—similar to Harriet’s—on his lap. Occasionally he wrote something. But mostly he just listened, and once in a while he blew his nose. The patient, a man sitting in another chair, was the one talking.

  At least, that is what Harriet had observed during the forty seconds she spent balanced and teetering before she fell into the pink impatiens. But she had also observed that his patients almost always looked happier on the way out than on the way in. She imagined they felt better after all that talking. And that intrigued her.

  WHAT PSYCHIATRISTS DO

  Harriet thought she might use this subject for a school report, so she kept the title in her notebook, but she had never figured out how to go beyond her opening thoughts. THEY TAKE ON YOUR BURDEN she had written tentatively. Then she had revised that to THEY HELP YOU LIFT YOUR BURDEN. And she believed it was true. It seemed you went to a psychiatrist if you felt burdened by something (grief and guilt and fear, in the case of Ole Golly), you told the psychiatrist about it, and then you were unburdened. Probably the psychiatrist was burdened then, but you didn’t worry about that because you paid him to do it, and anyway, that’s what he went to school for, so it wasn’t as if he didn’t know what he was getting into.

  But Ole Golly seemed to be more troubled and more burdened instead of less. So Harriet was puzzled. Harriet herself hadn’t felt unburdened when she came out of Dr. Wagner’s office—but she hadn’t had anything to unburden. Ole Golly had a burden. Harriet was sure of it.

  Also, Ole Golly had taken a small bag to each of her two visits to Dr. Feigenbaum, and Harriet was puzzled by that, too. It was not always the same bag; once it was simply plain brown paper, and the next time it was pale blue plastic. But it was a bag. Ole Golly went to her appointment carrying a bag and she returned home without it. She was taking something to Dr. Feigenbaum. If only Harriet had X-ray vision! If only she could see through the brown paper or the pale blue plastic and know what Ole Golly was taking across the street!

  • • •

  “What time is it there, ma petite?”

  Harriet sighed. “Mother, it is always six hours earlier here than it is in Paris. It never changes. It is two P.M. here, Sunday afternoon. There’s practically nothing on television but football.”

  “Bien entendu.”

  “Please would you speak English? And also, is it okay if I go to the downtown public library tomorrow after school? I need to do some research. I know how to get there on the subway. I never talk to strangers.”

  “Ask Miss Golly to take you,” her mother suggested.

  Harriet wrapped the telephone cord around her arm. It looked like an Egyptian bracelet, maybe an asp. “She takes a nap every afternoon. She hates it if I wake her up. I don’t think she’s feeling very well. You know she has problems,” Harriet said meaningfully. After all, it was to her mother that Ole Golly had confided her innocence.

  “Yes, she probably does need a nap,” Harriet’s mother said. “But Harriet, dear, see if a friend will go with you. I don’t like you going that far alone on the subway.”

  “I’ll ask Sport. If he says yes, can I go?”

  “Yes. But don’t linger. Don’t dawdle. Don’t—”

  “I won’t,” Harriet promised. She unwound the asp and changed the subject.

  • • •

  “Ole Golly,” Harriet said that night as she was getting ready for bed, “I’m going to the main library after school tomorrow. I asked Mother and she said it was all right. I called Sport and he said he’d go with me.”

  “Fine. Are you going to roll this up, Harriet, or will it be blocking the route to the bathroom all night?” Ole Golly was looking down at the time line, which had been increasing in length the more Harriet had been working on it. “It’s just the width of a carpet. I might decide to walk on it if you leave it there.”

  “Don’t you dare,” Harriet said defensively, though she was fairly certain Ole Golly was joking. It was sometimes hard to tell because her face was always frowny. “You’d be stepping on your own name! See? You appear everywhere on this. You’re the second most popular character on this time line. If there were Academy Awards for time lines, you’d be Best Supporting Actress.” Harriet pointed to Ole Golly’s name in several places.

  Ole Golly leaned over to peer at it. “What does that say, at AGE THREE?” she asked.

  Harriet read it to her in a fond voice. “FIRST HAIRCUT. OLE GOLLY SAVES SOME SNIPS OF HAIR.”

  “That’s true,” Ole Golly said. “I still have them. I gave some to your mother but she put them down on top of her dressing table, right beside some spilled powder. Later she wiped it all away. I kept mine, though, and put them into an album with your baby pictures.”

  “Did I have golden curls?” Harriet asked. “Like Beth Ellen Hansen?”

  “Of course not. You had sensible hair. Beauty is skin deep, Harriet.”

  “I know,” Harriet said, and sighed, thinking of Beth Ellen’s curls with envy. Of course, spies would be hampered by great beauty because they would stand out in a crowd, which spies shouldn’t do. But still.

  “I remember that day,” Ole Golly said. “You cried. You were frightened of the scissors.” She touched Harriet’s hair. “You need a haircut again, Harriet. You’re unkempt.” But she said it gently. Harriet could tell she wasn’t really distressed.

  “You took me everywhere,” Harriet remembered. “For all my first things. My first party shoes. My first dentist’s appointment. My first—”

  “Well, let us not turn into a greeting card,” Ole Golly said briskly. “The world has enough poor poetry and shallow sentiment. Roll it up now, and off to bed, Harriet. It’s a school night.”

  Harriet unweighted the end of the time line and watched it roll itself up. “You took me to my very first day of school,” she said. “I wore a blue dress.” Harriet remembered crying a little bit that day. And it had been Ole Golly who had consoled her. Harriet had unburdened herself to Ole Golly on a number of occasions. Now it was Ole Golly who needed the unburdening.

  “So you did. The dress was a little too large, but you grew into it.”

  “Every little girl in the world should have a you.”

  “Nonsense. Every child in the world should have adequate health care, access to education, strict but loving parents, and—” Ole Golly interrupted herself. “Enough of that. Good night, Harriet.” She turned away abruptly, took a deep breath, stalked into her room, and closed the door.

  • • •

  “Sport,” Harriet said, her shoulders slumping in frustration, “I’m not having any luck at all with this. I looked up Waldenstein, but everything I find is in German.”

  She and Sport were sitting side by side in the huge reading room at the New York Public Library.

  “Hmmmm,” Sport said. “I think that’s a dead end. Let’s try something else. Let’s see if we can find something about his murder in a Canadian newspaper. Where did you say they lived?”

  “Montreal.”

  “When would it have been, the murder?”

  “Don’t say murder. Say death. It was an accident. I know she’s innocent.”

  “Death, then,” Sport said.

  Harriet thought. Ole Golly had arrived in mid-August. She had come by plane, and apparently the authorities had not been on the lookout for her at airports. So she had escaped quickly from Canada after accidentally expunging George Waldenstein. Probably there had been a proper funeral. Probably at first they had thought it a natural death, maybe from old age.

  Even though Ole Golly refused to discuss age, Harriet knew from snooping and spying that she was forty-three. And George Waldenstein had been considerably older, at least fifty-five.

  So probably his death could have seemed like an old-age one at first. Then somehow the Canadian Mounties had become suspicious. It wouldn’t have taken them very long, even though they rode horses instead of driving
cars. Then—although she was innocent—Ole Golly would have fled to New York.

  “During the last week in July or the first week in August, I think,” Harriet said, after visualizing the calendar and the events surrounding George Waldenstein’s death.

  “Okay, I’ll go ask. You keep looking for Waldensteins while I’m gone.”

  Sport set out to put in his request at the reference desk. Harriet yawned and looked at the ceiling. She loved the New York Public Library reading room ceiling. It was covered in painted clouds. It made Harriet feel as if angels might at any moment begin to strum harps and hum songs in high, ringing voices. Harriet thought she might like to have clouds painted on the ceiling of her bedroom, but she was afraid that Brian Cleary, the painter who had applied fresh yellow paint to Ole Golly’s room during the summer, would not know how to do clouds. Brian Cleary listened to baseball games on a small radio covered with paint spatters, and he swore a lot while he worked. If Ole Golly knew the bad language that Harriet had overheard coming from that room, she would probably not be willing to sleep in it.

  Harriet waited a very long time for Sport. Finally he returned, carrying a bound stack of newspapers.

  “Got it!” he said triumphantly. “Montreal Gazette! It’s in English. They had some newspapers in French but I told them only English.”

  Together they leafed through the pages, reading obituaries.

  But it was hopeless. It was as if George Waldenstein had never died, or even lived. Finally they closed up the Montreal Gazettes and left the library. Harriet wanted to stop in the gift shop. There were many things Harriet liked in the library gift shop, but the thing she liked best of all was a set of bronze bookends—reproductions of the two sculpted lions that guarded the front of the library. Harriet wanted the lion bookends very badly, and her birthday was coming up, so she thought it would be a good idea to stand in front of them and yearn. But Sport made her hurry past.

  “You missed your cake and milk,” Ole Golly said when Harriet arrived home.

  “I know. I told you I was going to the library with Sport.”

  Harriet went into the upstairs study. She sat at her father’s desk and began to write up the library trip in her notebook. Even though it had been an unsuccessful expedition, all spying events had to be documented. Later, when she was doing this as a career, she would have to send bills to clients. She knew they would demand to know how she had spent each hour, even fruitless hours like the trip to the library.

  The telephone rang and Harriet answered. “Welsch residence.”

  “Simon Rocque here.”

  “You said you had to tend your leg of lamb and bake a pie.”

  “I do, but I forgot to ask you something.”

  Harriet closed her notebook. “So ask,” she said, tilting her father’s chair back so her feet lifted from the rug.

  “This is not a question about Montreal, or spying,” Sport explained.

  “You’re blushing again. It’s about the girl with the green shoes, isn’t it?” Harriet swiveled her father’s desk chair so she was facing away from his desk, looking toward the bookcase. The telephone cord wrapped itself around her neck in a death grip.

  “Sort of.”

  “Wait. I’m strangling.” Harriet reversed her swivel and saved her own life.

  “Okay,” she said. “What’s your question?”

  “Well, do you think it would be okay if I invited her to my apartment after school, for pie?”

  “How messy is it?”

  “The pie? It’s fine. It’ll be messy when I put whipped cream on it, though.”

  “No, the apartment.”

  She waited and could feel Sport looking around. “It’s okay,” he said, “as long as I close the door to my dad’s office. His office is always a mess.” Matthew Rocque was the kind of writer who worked at home. Harriet had seen his office, and Sport was correct. His desk was piled with papers, and there were always several used coffee cups on the floor, sometimes with a plate or two bearing pieces of stale sandwich.

  “I thought maybe when he got married, his wife—I mean your stepmother—would make him clean it up.”

  “No. Kate says she accepts that it’s hopeless. And in return, he accepts that she hums country-and-western songs.”

  Harriet considered that. It seemed a fair trade. She thought about starting a page in her notebook with the heading COMPROMISES ONE MIGHT MAKE IN A MARRIAGE. Her parents had made compromises, she realized. Harriet’s father didn’t object if her mother spent a lot of money at Lord & Taylor. And Harriet’s mother didn’t object if her father sometimes was late for dinner.

  “So what do you think, Harriet?”

  Harriet tried to pay attention to Sport. “I guess it’d be okay. She’ll have to ask her parents, though. Be sure to tell her that your dad works at home. Most parents won’t let a kid go to an apartment where there are no grown-ups.”

  “She doesn’t have parents,” Sport said.

  “She’s an orphan? Like the girl in The Secret Garden?”

  “She’s a refugee from a war-torn third-world country,” Sport said in a solemn voice. “I heard her telling somebody.”

  “No kidding. So she’ll have to ask a social worker or something. Maybe you ought to write the invitation formally, and have your father sign it, so it looks really legitimate. Put an RSVP.”

  “Good idea. Too late for this pie, though. It’d be stale by the time she RSVP’d.”

  “You can make another one. Try chocolate cream. You’re good at those.”

  “Harriet.” Sport spoke in a you’re-trying-my-patience voice. “I’m good at all pies.”

  “Before you hang up,” she said, “what’s her name? I can’t keep calling her just ‘the girl with the green shoes.’ ”

  Sport hesitated. Finally he said in a hushed and reverential tone, “Yolanda Montezuma.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Harriet sighed and unrolled her time line. It was now a good three feet longer than it had been originally, as Harriet had been forced to tape on several more pages. Certain pivotal events simply could not go unrecorded. Its edges were a little frayed from all the rolling and unrolling. She had wanted it to remain crisp and neat, filled with fascinating reminders of her twelve years of life—well, twelve next week, just before Halloween—but it hadn’t worked out that way. Some of the ink had smeared. There was a footprint on the entry of her poison ivy at age nine. And somehow a raisin had been smashed and stuck to the section marked EARLY CHILDHOOD SUCCESSES, where she had briefly noted her mastery of reading at age five, as well as her amazing ability—at three and four—to hold her breath for long periods of time, even though she had had an argument with Ole Golly about that notation.

  “I’d hardly call that a success,” Ole Golly had said, looking down at the breath-holding entry. “They were tantrums. You kicked your feet and held your breath until you turned blue. Your mother always wanted to call an ambulance, but I told her that it was simply a kind of manipulation.”

  “But remember you timed me in the bathtub? And I put my head underwater and stayed for an astounding length of time?”

  “That was much later, Harriet. You were at least eight. You had fins and a snorkel.”

  When Harriet thought about it, she realized that Ole Golly was, not surprisingly, correct. She usually was. But the breath-holding notation was written in permanent marker—Ultra Fine Sharpie—so it couldn’t be changed.

  Carefully Harriet peeled the squashed raisin away and glared with distaste at the small stain it had left. She weighted the BIRTH end of the time line and crawled beside the length of the unrolled paper until she reached AGE TWELVE at the other end, which extended through the door of her bedroom into the hall. She lifted one leg of the telephone table and placed it on a corner of the paper to keep it flat. Then she stared at TWELFTH BIRTHDAY, wondering what events she might list, even though the birthday itself was still a week away.

  Previous birthday notations included

&nbs
p; SIXTH: CHICKEN POX; FIFTH: TRIP TO CIRCUS

  with a subheading:

  THREW UP ON FATHER’S TROUSERS (MIXTURE OF CRACKER JACK AND LEMONADE)

  and

  ELEVENTH: VISIT TO HARDWARE STORE WITH AUTHORIZED CHARGING PRIVILEGES (PURCHASE OF COMPLETE SET OF SPYING EQUIPMENT, INCLUDING BOY SCOUT KNIFE WITH SCREWDRIVER AND FLASHLIGHT WITH BLINKING AND FILTERING CAPACITY).

  Recalling her eleventh birthday, just a year ago minus one week, Harriet smiled happily. Fondly she felt her tool belt—purchased on that birthday along with the spying tools, all of it on her father’s charge account, and with his permission—and the loop that just fit the dangling flashlight, though it was not dangling there at the moment. Harriet kept the flashlight in the drawer of her bedside table when she didn’t need it.

  A shadow fell across her time line, and Harriet looked up at Ole Golly, who had come from her room across the hall and was looking down. As usual, she was swathed in tweed.

  “Remember my parents gave you a beautiful blue silk dress for Christmas last year? Remember it has embroidery on the collar and the belt? You never wear it,” Harriet pointed out.

  “Silk is not intended for everyday wear,” Ole Golly said with a sniff.

  “Well, will you wear it for my birthday?”

  “I think not.”

  For some reason Harriet wanted to poke Ole Golly, to jar her, to set her off-balance so she would turn back into the real Ole Golly instead of this mopey, disagreeable person she had become.

  “I insist that you promise to wear your blue silk dress with the embroidered belt on my birthday,” Harriet said.

  “I think not.”

  “I humbly beg,” Harriet said firmly. Humbly begging was something Harriet very rarely did. Ole Golly knew that she meant business when she humbly begged.