Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

Malcolm’s and Edmund’s names had been taken from Shakespeare plays, which Harriet thought was a very dumb way to choose children’s names because what if someone got Hamlet or Iago? They would not have one single friend at school because everyone would just be laughing at them about their names.

  Harriet had been named for her father, Harry Welsch. She had added the M. herself, since she had no middle name and felt deprived. M. didn’t stand for a name. It stood for middle.

  “Well, of course we could have taken her along and put her into a French school—what do they call them? A lycée? École? Whatever. But she has her friends here, and her projects—”

  She paused for a moment, and Harriet knew that Sylvia Connelly was yammering. Yammer yammer yammer.

  “You’re a dear,” her mother went on. “Yes, do invite her over now and then. She’d love it.”

  Harriet sighed and attached her pliers to her belt. She patted her back pocket to be certain her notebook was there, and her shirt pocket to check on her pen. She looked at her watch: 9:41. She listened from the top of the stairs and determined that her mother had finished talking to Sylvia and maybe the telephone would be available for a minute or two before one of them called the other again. Sport would still be busy with his lasagna pan, she knew, but she dialed his number anyway.

  No answer. Harriet had expected that. Sport often didn’t take calls when he was busy with housework. And his father was rarely there now that Kate had become part of his life. He and Kate were still in the romantic early-marriage stage where they did things like go to the zoo or ride the Staten Island ferry. Harriet had noticed that lovers and newlyweds in movies—at least movies set in New York—all did exactly the same things: ferry, zoo, bookstore, Chinese restaurant, and Greenwich Village. After they did all those things about forty times, always holding hands and smooching, then, Harriet supposed, real life could start.

  In the meantime real people like Sport and Harriet had to hold down the fort, spying and washing lasagna dishes.

  CONTINUING FEIGENBAUM INVESTIGATION

  SATURDAY MORNING, AUGUST 19TH

  Harriet made the note, replaced the notebook in her pocket, and headed down the stairs. As she passed her parents’ bedroom, she could see open suitcases on the bed and a stack of her mother’s sweaters folded on a chair. She heard her mother dialing. “Syl?” her mother said into the telephone. “I just thought of one other thing. . . .”

  Yammer yammer yammer. Harriet continued down the second flight of stairs and went out through the front door onto East Eighty-seventh Street.

  • • •

  Qualms was a word Harriet liked a lot. It was on several of her lists, and she hoped fervently that someday she would be able to use it in a Scrabble game, maybe when Ole Golly was reinstalled in her third-floor bedroom. Harriet and Ole Golly had often played Scrabble.

  Now, though, returning from Montreal, where she had probably taken up speaking French because Montreal was in the French-speaking part of Canada, Ole Golly might very well be equipped with a lot of Q words. Harriet knew from fifth- and sixth-grade French class that the language did use Qs in frequent and mystifying ways, such as Qu’est-ce que c’est? Harriet had learned to say that pretty well, repeating it and repeating it along with the entire class, but she thought it a very strange phrase, and she still didn’t understand how it went together or how the French had thought it up.

  She crossed the street when the light at the corner turned red and the stream of traffic let up. She decided to make a Scrabble rule for the future: no French.

  That still allowed for qualms, Harriet thought with satisfaction.

  She had no qualms about the intrusions good spying required. She had lurked often and eavesdropped many, many times. Lurking and eavesdropping were, Harriet knew, socially unacceptable. But not for spies.

  Once, she had even hidden in a dumbwaiter, all folded up and uncomfortable, to collect information about a mysterious neighbor. She did not plan to do that again.

  She walked to the end of the block, around the corner, and down a narrow alley into a passageway that would take her to the backyard of the Feigenbaums’ brownstone. Beside their fence, hidden by two large trash cans, Harriet knelt and made notes.

  PERSON PASSES TO AND FRO IN FRONT OF KITCHEN WINDOW. CANNOT BE COOK. IF THEY HAD COOK THEY WOULD NOT KEEP TRYING TO STEAL OURS.

  Harriet looked at that paragraph, loving the word fro. She closed her notebook and peered through the fence at the Feigenbaums’ kitchen window. Then she reopened her notebook and added:

  SHORT PERSON WITH PONYTAIL.

  As Harriet watched, the short, ponytailed figure opened the refrigerator, stood there a moment indecisively, and then took out a bottle of what appeared to be orange juice. Then, holding the bottle, the person moved out of Harriet’s range of vision.

  A gray-and-white cat appeared, stretching itself flat under the fence and then popping back into its normal shape. It rubbed itself against Harriet’s high-top hiking boot. She scratched its neck while she thought.

  Neither Feigenbaum has a ponytail. So this is a stranger. Possibly a home invader. They could be in danger. They may be hostages.

  She waited a few moments, watching for a reappearance of the stranger or a glimpse of a bound-and-gagged Feigenbaum. But nothing moved past the windows.

  Harriet decided to make an appearance at the front of the house to attract the attention of the stranger. It was a dangerous move, she knew. Therefore, she decided to rewrite her will before going any further.

  Harriet had several copies of her will and always carried one with her. She sighed, took out her notebook again, and removed the folded will from between the back pages. It was a nuisance rewriting the will because each time she rewrote it, she had to remember to change all existing copies. But sometimes, especially in dangerous situations, it had to be done.

  LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF HARRIET M. WELSCH

  Harriet glanced at the pages and realized that the will was due for revision anyway because she had written Ole Golly out when she married and moved away. Hastily, kneeling behind the trash cans, she wrote Ole Golly back in.

  I BEQUEATH MY TIME LINE AND MY SCRABBLE DICTIONARY TO CATHERINE GOLLY WALDENSTEIN.

  She chewed on her pen for a moment and then added:

  OR, AS SHE APPARENTLY PREFERS TO BE KNOWN NOW, CATHERINE GOLLY.

  Quickly she reread the rest of her will, which left all her spying equipment and her notebooks to Simon Rocque, aka Sport; her clothes and tennis racket to Beth Ellen Hansen; and her last three years of science projects, all currently located in the storage area off the Welsches’ kitchen, to Janie Gibbs.

  ALL ELSE TO THE HOMELESS, Harriet wrote in carefully. THIS INCLUDES MY LAMP DESIGNED TO LOOK LIKE A HEINZ KETCHUP BOTTLE, WHICH I BOUGHT AT A YARD SALE WHEN I WAS SEVEN.

  From time to time she worried about the future of that lamp and whether homeless people would have a place to plug it in. But she didn’t know how else to bequeath her lamp, since everyone she knew, including Sport and Janie, hated it.

  Finally, feeling that she had disposed of her worldly goods satisfactorily, Harriet headed to the front of the Feigenbaums’ house. Boldly, without hesitation, she climbed the front steps and rang the doorbell. She had often observed the Feigenbaums’ patients doing this as she watched from her own house. All of Barbara Feigenbaum’s patients were female, and many of them were pregnant, some quite huge. All of Morris Feigenbaum’s patients looked completely average, like businessmen, housewives, bus drivers, or convenience-store owners. Harriet supposed that beneath their average exteriors they had deeply troubled souls. Sometimes she watched through binoculars to see if their hands trembled as they rang the bell of their psychiatrist’s office.

  After ringing the bell, they would say something—their names, she guessed—into the little speaker. Then the door would be released and they would enter for their appointments.

  “Yes?” A voice greeted her through the speaker as she stood on the steps
. It sounded like a receptionist, not a home invader.

  “Dr. Hrrmmmpphhhrr,” Harriet muttered.

  “Say again?”

  “Rummmffffsshh.”

  The door clicked and unlocked itself. Harriet entered.

  • • •

  Interesting, Harriet thought, looking around. The floor plan was exactly like that of her own house. Stairs with a handsome curving banister rose to the right of the hall. To the left, where Harriet’s living room was—where just the night before she had sat glumly while her parents told her she was not going with them to Paris—there was a heavy, closed mahogany door. On it a small brass plaque said MORRIS FEIGENBAUM, M.D.

  Harriet tiptoed to the closed door and laid her left ear against it. From inside she could hear a low murmur: a woman’s voice. Yammer yammer yammer. Harriet couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded like complaints. The voice sounded like her mother’s friend Sylvia Connelly, who complained frequently. “So I took it back to Lord and Taylor and told them that never in my life had I been sold such shoddy merchandise. . . . And the headmaster, well, they call him the commandant, called me and said that Malcolm had been disruptive, and I said, ‘Sir! This boy is an angel at home, and if he isn’t an angel at your school, well, I would look to the environment. . . .’ So I bid four hearts, which should have been a closeout, but that idiot said four spades, and . . .”

  Yammer yammer. It wasn’t Sylvia Connelly behind the door, Harriet knew, because Sylvia Connelly was at her stupid apartment on Fifth Avenue, yammering on the telephone to Harriet’s mother. But it sounded like Sylvia Connelly, and Harriet felt very sorry for Morris Feigenbaum because he had to listen.

  “Who is it?” The same voice she had heard through the speaker, the receptionist’s voice, called down the stairs. Harriet noticed now that there was another brass plaque, this one saying BARBARA FEIGENBAUM, M.D., on the wall beside the staircase, and there was a small arrow pointing up. Fearful that the receptionist would lean over the railing and look down into the hall, Harriet scurried to the rear of the hallway and stood behind a large antique cabinet at the top of the stairs that she knew from her own house’s identical geography led to the kitchen. She took out her notebook.

  HEADING DOWN TO KITCHEN WHERE STRANGER WAS SEEN. THESE MAY BE MY LAST WORDS.

  She stood silently for a moment, aware that these were not very interesting last words. She tried to think of one of Ole Golly’s meaningful quotations. The one that came to mind seemed completely suitable and she wrote the words at the end of her will with satisfaction.

  PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEIR WORK LOVE LIFE.

  SIGNED: HARRIET M. (FOR MIDDLE) WELSCH, SPY

  Harriet replaced her notebook in her pocket and began to inch forward. When, moving stealthily, she was partway down the stairs to the kitchen, she heard footsteps below her, and the opening of a door.

  “Here, kitty kitty,” a girl’s voice called.

  Harriet waited.

  “There you are, silly kitty,” the girl crooned. “Come in.” The door closed and Harriet heard footsteps again.

  Suddenly, before she had time to hide in the shadows, Harriet was confronted by a ponytailed girl at the foot of the stairs. She was holding the gray-and-white cat from the yard and was staring in surprise at Harriet.

  “Who are you?” the girl asked.

  Harriet drew herself up. “Private investigator,” she said in an authoritative voice. “I heard reports of a home invasion taking place at this address. Just checking. Everything all right here?”

  “Private investigator, my foot. You’re no older than I am.”

  “I’m a spy,” Harriet said defiantly.

  “And I’m a transvestite movie star.”

  “Hah.”

  “Double hah.”

  The two girls stared at each other. The cat began to wriggle in the ponytailed girl’s arms. She tried to clasp it more tightly but its wriggling increased and it meowed.

  “Scratch it under the chin, gently,” Harriet suggested.

  “You think you know everything about cats?”

  “Well, I know about this cat,” Harriet said. “And you don’t seem to.” The girl frowned and scratched the cat under its chin. The cat stretched and began to purr.

  “Who are you, anyway?” the girl asked.

  “My name’s Harriet M. Welsch. I’m a spy. I told you that already but you don’t seem to listen. I live across the street. Who are you?”

  “Is someone down there?” the receptionist’s voice called down the stairs.

  “Just me, talking to the cat!” the girl called back.

  They could hear the receptionist climbing the stairs back to the second floor.

  “They’ll kill you if they catch you in here. You’d better go out the back door,” the strange girl told Harriet. “It’s over this way.” She gestured.

  “I know where it is,” Harriet replied haughtily. “I know the entire floor plan of this house. Storage area over there, right?” She pointed to a small door off the kitchen.

  “Think you’re smart?”

  “Know I’m smart,” Harriet retorted. She went to the back door. “Who are you? I told you who I am.”

  “My name is Camilla Languid and I am terminally ill,” the girl said. “My parents can’t deal with the pain and grief and so I am living with my doctor until my demise, which is imminent. I may die this afternoon.”

  “You don’t even look sick,” Harriet said. She stepped through the back door, which Camilla Languid had unlocked and was holding open for her.

  “I’m on steroids. I expect to live until next week, actually.”

  Harriet didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t known a dying person before. Well, once maybe. A homeless man who had often slept under the front steps of a house around the corner. Harriet had gotten to know him fairly well. Then one day he was drunk and was hit by a bus on Madison Avenue and died. So technically, she figured, when she knew him he was a dying person. But it wasn’t quite the same.

  “I’m very sorry,” Harriet said politely. “I hope to see you again before . . .” She didn’t know how to finish the sentence, so her voice trailed off awkwardly. She moved across the yard toward the gate and waved to the girl, who stood in the doorway watching her.

  As she let herself out and pulled the gate closed behind her, Harriet heard the girl call loudly, “You didn’t believe that, did you?”

  “Believe what?”

  “All that crud about me being terminally ill? You stupe!”

  “Of course I didn’t,” Harriet lied. “You didn’t believe that crud about me being a spy, did you?”

  “No. What do you think I am, a jerk?”

  Yes, Harriet thought, but decided not to say.

  “I’m actually a juvenile delinquent,” the girl called. “My name is Rosarita Sauvage and I’m under house arrest. I wear an electronic anklet.”

  Harriet opened the gate and poked her head through. “And I,” she called back, “am actually named Harriet M. Welsch and I really am a spy. So watch out!”

  With dignity Harriet closed the gate again and made her way home. She felt oddly disappointed. For a minute on seeing the girl with the ponytail she had thought that perhaps she would have a new friend living right across the street. Harriet would have liked that. She had friends at school, but none of them were truly what Harriet thought of as FOTHs, Friends of the Heart: the kind of people who shared her hopes and dreams. Her school friends seemed to share things like homework assignments and gossip, and those were things that didn’t interest Harriet much. Sport was certainly a FOTH, but he was a boy, which mattered even though it shouldn’t; also, he wasn’t across the street.

  “Telephone for you, dear,” her mother called as she climbed the stairs.

  “Who is it? Sport?”

  “No, I think it’s a girl. She sounds quite odd. I do hope you’re not mixed up with unsavory people, Harriet.”

  Harriet rolled her eyes and answered the phone.


  “H’spy?” the voice said. “Rosarita here.”

  “I told you, my name’s Harriet.”

  “I’m calling you H’spy. People need secret names. H’spy can be yours.”

  “How do you spell it?”

  “H-apostrophe-S-P-Y.”

  “It’s weird. You can’t put H and S together. Maybe if you’re Chinese, but I’m not. And you don’t put apostrophes in names.”

  “You can do whatever you want. In my last school there were several people with apostrophes in their names. Q’aadara was one. I put an apostrophe in H’spy because I think you need it. It’s nicely flamboyant.”

  “Spies aren’t supposed to be flamboyant,” Harriet pointed out, though actually she was beginning to like the idea of the apostrophe and was already picturing the unusual signature it could make. “Where do you go to school, anyway?”

  Rosarita sighed. “I am about to enter a terrible school designed especially for miscreants and misfits. I won’t speak its name aloud.”

  “How did you get my phone number? Why did you call me?” Harriet asked. “You said I was a stupe.”

  “You’re the spy. It’s easy to find a phone number if you know someone’s name and address. Well, you live across the street. I thought we might have some sort of relationship.”

  “Like we could be friends?”

  There was a silence. “That’s going too far. Let’s just say that we might meet occasionally to converse and compare notes.”

  “An infrequent meeting or conversation might be nice,” Harriet agreed. She was not one to share her notes.

  “I’m going to give you a telephone number. If you call, let it ring once, then hang up. It’s a signal. I’ll call back and we’ll arrange to meet.”

  Harriet wrote down the number. “All right,” she said. “A dial-and-ditch. I can do that.”

  “G’bye, H’spy.”

  “Goodbye,” Harriet said, and hung up the phone. For a moment she stood there, wondering whether she had a new friend or a new problem.

  CHAPTER 4

  Finally: Tuesday! Harriet’s time line was spread out on her bedroom floor, and she was working on the events of the past several days. But it was difficult to concentrate. Every so often she stood up and looked through her front window down to the street below. She was watching for a taxi. Ole Golly was due any minute.