Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  She wrote carefully on a new page:

  SUGGESTIONS FOR POSSIBLY CHEERING UP OLE GOLLY

  She underlined it. Harriet didn’t often underline things. But she felt an urgency in this list. She got up and repositioned herself on the Rhinelanders’ front steps four houses down the street, within view of her own house, and thought. Nothing much came to mind at first, so she carefully gave the title a spastic colon by placing two dots vertically after the word Golly so that it became GOLLY:.

  (It was really only an ordinary colon. But Harriet had once overheard her father talking about a network executive named Mr. Alfred Lancaster who had a spastic colon. She liked the sound of the phrase. Now whenever she made two vertical dots, she thought spastic colon. It gave a sense of importance to punctuation that was otherwise completely undistinguished.)

  She began to make the list.

  1. WATCH A MOVIE TOGETHER, BUT NOT ONE THAT HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH OLE GOLLY’S RECENT PAST.

  2. DISCUSS BOOKS, BUT NOT ANY THAT HAVE TO DO WITH OLE GOLLY’S RECENT PAST.

  3. JOIN AN EXERCISE CLASS AT THE 92ND STREET Y. OR MAYBE YOGA. (WOULD OLE GOLLY DO THIS? PROBABLY NOT. SHE DOES NOT LIKE TO EXHIBIT HER BODY.)

  4. OH LORD, INVITE SYLVIA CONNELLY OVER FOR LUNCH. (ONLY IF MALCOLM AND EDMUND ARE NOT IN TOWN BECAUSE IF SHE BROUGHT THEM IT WOULD BE UNBEARABLE. IT WOULD BE UNBEARABLE ANYWAY.)

  5. TAKE HER TO SAKS FIFTH AVENUE AND MAKE SCATHING REMARKS ABOUT THE CLOTHES. (SOMETIMES OLE GOLLY IS WILLING TO DO THIS.)

  6. DISTRIBUTE SANDWICHES TO HOMELESS PEOPLE AND URGE THEM GENTLY AND UNJUDGMENTALLY TO PULL THEMSELVES TOGETHER.

  7. VISIT A FORTUNE-TELLER.

  But even after the list was complete, Harriet didn’t feel any better about the situation. By the time she finished this entry, there had still been no glimpse of the strange girl in the Feigenbaums’ house.

  • • •

  Her parents had left for Paris with a flurry of last-minute instructions and an assortment of luggage that required them to take two separate taxis to the airport. They had arrived safely in France and had telephoned the next day.

  “Bonjour! It’s three P.M. here!” her mother had announced excitedly into the phone. “What time is it there?”

  “Nine A.M.,” Harriet told her. “I’m still eating breakfast. I’m sitting in the kitchen.”

  “Oh!” her mother said, as if breakfast were exciting. “What are you having?”

  “Cornflakes and banana. I ordered Belgian waffles with fresh strawberries but Cook told me to go soak my head.”

  “It’s raining here! What is it doing there?”

  Harriet glanced through the window. “Nothing. A little cloudy.”

  “And Ole Golly’s all right?”

  “I guess.” She would never tell her parents. Harriet had decided that whatever was deeply troubling Ole Golly, she would deal with it alone. A spy’s life was very often solitary.

  “I’ll call again in a few days! Kiss kiss!” That was her mother’s telephone way of saying goodbye. Harriet sighed, said a normal goodbye to her mother, hung up the phone, and went back to her last bit of cornflakes. Cook, at the sink, glanced over.

  “Yammer yammer,” Harriet said, and shrugged.

  “You wait. She’ll be yammering in French pretty soon.”

  “I don’t mind. I speak French. I learned it in school.”

  “How do you say cornflakes with banana?” Cook asked, taking Harriet’s empty bowl to the sink.

  Harriet thought. “We didn’t learn that yet,” she said finally. “But this is la table.” She pointed to the wooden kitchen table. “My cornflakes were sur la table. You can see I’m pretty fluent.”

  “How do you say Your cornflakes are all gone and I want to clean the kitchen and you’re in the way?” Cook asked, standing with a sponge poised over the table.

  Harriet pondered the question. “I would tell you,” she said, “but you are too mean and sarcastic. Tell me, Cook, do you belong to the Mean and Sarcastic Club of Brooklyn?”

  “Yes,” Cook replied. “I’m president. Move your butt out of that chair.”

  “I could say that in French if I wished,” Harriet told her, and left the kitchen. “Au revoir,” she called breezily from the stairs.

  Up in her room again, Harriet went straight for her notebook and turned to the Ole Golly section.

  THINGS THAT COULD BE MAKING OLE GOLLY SAD:

  1. COOK’S BAD ATTITUDE

  2. THE DECLINE OF THE NOVEL IN WESTERN CIVILIZATION (Harriet had heard Ole Golly mention this on several occasions.)

  3. THE MYSTERIOUS HAPPENINGS IN MONTREAL THAT LED HER TO RESUME HER POST IN THE WELSCH HOUSEHOLD

  4. SOMETHING I HAVE DONE

  Using her deductive reasoning, Harriet concluded that number 3 was the most likely cause (closely followed by number 1 and number 2. Number 4 seemed highly unlikely to Harriet).

  WHY HAS OLE GOLLY RETURNED TO NEW YORK ALONE? WHERE IS GEORGE WALDENSTEIN? WHY WOULD SHE RETURN ALONE IF IT MADE HER SAD? SHE SHOULD HAVE JUST BROUGHT HIM WITH HER. THE YELLOW BEDROOM IS ONLY SLIGHTLY SMALLER THAN MY OWN AND COULD EASILY ACCOMMODATE TWO PEOPLE. OLE GOLLY WOULD NOT HAVE RETURNED WITHOUT HER HUSBAND UNLESS THERE WAS NO ALTERNATIVE.

  Harriet came up with only one possible conclusion.

  GEORGE WALDENSTEIN WOULD BE INCAPABLE OF RETURNING TO NEW YORK ONLY IF HE IS DECEASED.

  Harriet looked at the words and immediately knew they were true. It was nothing less than a tragedy. Granted, Harriet had not cared for George Waldenstein immediately. Upon first meeting him, he had seemed much too obvious. And why had a grown man still been a delivery boy anyway? But she had come around quickly. George Waldenstein was quite different from the other adults she had known—just like Ole Golly. They really had been a perfect match. Harriet was crestfallen at the news. (What exactly did crestfallen mean? How does a crest fall and why would anyone care if it did?)

  No wonder Ole Golly was sad. It was like Romeo and Juliet, only completely different.

  Words from Harriet’s favorite poem came to her mind, so she wrote them in her notebook.

  “I WEEP FOR YOU,” THE WALRUS SAID:

  “I DEEPLY SYMPATHIZE.”

  WITH SOBS AND TEARS HE SORTED OUT

  THOSE OF THE LARGEST SIZE,

  HOLDING HIS POCKET-HANDKERCHIEF

  BEFORE HIS STREAMING EYES.

  • • •

  Ole Golly spoke French, as well. Harriet had discovered this piece of information one evening when she mentioned to Ole Golly that she had met someone with an unusual name. Harriet didn’t want to explain that she had actually entered the Feigenbaums’ house under what might be called false pretenses. So she simply said, “I have met someone with an unusual name.”

  “And that would be?”

  “Rosarita Sauvage,” Harriet said.

  They were in Ole Golly’s bedroom after dinner. The chocolate kisses were all gone, and Harriet had not found a way to bring up the topic of kissing tactfully. She decided she would buy more and try again.

  Ole Golly was casting blue stitches onto a long knitting needle. She was starting a sweater for Harriet. Harriet had chosen the pattern out of a knitting book: blue with yellow stripes and an occasional red starlike shape. It looked very difficult. But Ole Golly said it wasn’t.

  “Stand here for a minute with your back to me.” Ole Golly took her tape measure and stretched it across the back of Harriet’s shoulders. Harriet held her arms out like a scarecrow and hoped the tape measure wouldn’t touch her armpits. She was very ticklish there.

  “Rosareeeeeeta Sauvaaaaage,” she repeated, dragging the sounds out as if she were playing them on an oboe. It seemed a very mysterious name.

  Ole Golly rolled up the tape measure and went back to the knitting needles. She began to count stitches.

  “Rosareeeeeeta Sauvaaaaage,” Harriet intoned again.

  “Shhhhh. Thirty-nine, forty, forty-one . . .”

  Finally Ole Golly finished counting. She stabbed th
e needles into the ball of yarn and placed it in her knitting basket at the foot of the rocking chair. “Fierce,” she said. “Untamed.”

  Harriet frowned. “I don’t think so. Maybe if it had big patches of different colors on it, it would be sort of untamed. But a few stripes and those little star things, that’s fairly ordinary. Beth Ellen Hansen has a sweater that her grandmother got in Norway, and it—”

  “The name,” Ole Golly said. “Sauvage. Or, as you apparently prefer to say it: Sauvaaaaage. That’s French for fierce.”

  “No kidding! You speak French that well, that you can translate a name? I didn’t know you could do that, Ole Golly! I thought I knew everything about you, but—”

  “No one knows everything about another human being, Harriet. It is presumptuous to think so.”

  Harriet thought it over and realized Ole Golly was right. She kept learning new things about people every single day.

  “You’re right,” she conceded. “Just this morning I learned that Cook is president of the Mean and Sarcastic Club of Brooklyn. And now I learn that you are bilingual. I wonder what other secrets you might be keeping from me.” She looked meaningfully, sympathetically, knowingly at Ole Golly.

  But Ole Golly, examining the knitting instructions, only said, “Are you sure you want those star shapes in red?”

  Harriet sighed. “Oui,” she said, remembering her sixth-grade French. “Rouge.”

  “All right then. Rouge, to go with the bleu and the jaune.” Ole Golly poked through the basket of yarns and took out a small skein of red. “Hold this,” she directed, “while I wind it into a ball.”

  Dutifully Harriet put the skein of red yarn over her hands and held them slightly apart. She had been doing this for years and was quite experienced at it now; she knew just how to hold the yarn taut and move her hands slightly as Ole Golly wound it into a ball.

  “How did you learn French? Did they teach it in school in Far Rockaway? How do you say knitting in French?”

  “Tricotage, I think. And no, I did not learn French in Far Rockaway. The only things I learned in Far Rockaway were roller-skating, penmanship, and a passionate wish to flee.”

  “But how—”

  “I’ve been living for some months in Montreal, remember. You pick up a lot of French if you live in Montreal.”

  Ah! thought Harriet. A conversational opening! Carefully she considered how to make use of it.

  “I suppose,” she began in a casual voice, “that one might pick up a lot of things in Montreal.”

  “One might.” The little red ball of yarn was growing in Ole Golly’s hands as she wound it with exactness.

  Harriet thought. She wanted to say, “A fatal illness, perhaps?” And from there Ole Golly would tell all, would reveal the death of George Waldenstein, her own huge, unassuageable grief, and her decision to return to the home where she had once been happy and carefree. But Harriet felt it would be unseemly to mention the death, particularly since she had been forbidden to mention Mr. Waldenstein’s name to Ole Golly. She had to make her way toward it gradually.

  “One might pick up a taste for French cooking, I suppose.”

  “Yes. La cuisine. One might, indeed,” Ole Golly replied.

  Harriet tried to picture how it might have happened. She pictured George Waldenstein as she had known him: balding, with a mustache, a shy, formal smile, and a pudgy, roly-poly, Pillsbury Doughboy body. He did love to eat, Harriet knew. Often during their courtship Mr. Waldenstein and Ole Golly had gone to restaurants in the neighborhood for dinner.

  Perhaps he had simply eaten too much and his stomach had burst and he had died.

  Harriet thought of French food words she knew. Many of the vocabulary words in fifth- and sixth-grade French had been food words.

  “I imagine that in Montreal one might be tempted to eat too many haricots verts and pommes frites and marrons glacés and gâteaux and then one could get a terrible stomachache or appendicitis.”

  Ole Golly didn’t reply.

  “And you could die.”

  Ole Golly frowned at Harriet in a puzzled but unperturbed way and still didn’t reply.

  Maybe, Harriet thought, it wasn’t simple overeating that had killed George Waldenstein. Maybe it was food poisoning. A bad piece of fish could

  do it.

  She moved her hands and the yarn continued to unwind. Or maybe it was murder, Harriet thought. Yet unsolved. That would cause a lot of sighing.

  Harriet tried to think of a way to approach the subject tactfully and in a roundabout manner. Spies were good at getting information by such means.

  “Sometimes,” Harriet said, “it is very hard to accept the loss of a loved one if you don’t know exactly why it happened, and maybe you keep thinking you could have prevented it, like, oh, let me see, in this book I read once, I forget the title, about a woman—well, actually, she was a mermaid—anyway, she was deeply in love with—”

  To her astonishment, Ole Golly stopped winding the yarn. She looked stricken. Then she whipped the remaining strand of red from Harriet’s outstretched hands.

  “Enough,” she said tersely. “Thank you for your help. Please go and take your bath.”

  “But—”

  “Just go. Va t’en. Vite.”

  Harriet did. Obediently she turned on the water to fill the tub. Then, while she waited, she took out her notebook and wrote.

  GEORGE WALDENSTEIN WAS MURDERED IN MONTREAL. IT WAS PROBABLY A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT BUT WE DO NOT KNOW FOR SURE. OLE GOLLY’S DEEP GRIEF WILL NEVER BE CURED UNTIL SHE KNOWS THE ANSWERS. THIS WILL TAKE PRECEDENTS PRECEDNE PRESIDENCE OVER ALL MY OTHER ONGOING CASES.

  Later, sitting in the tub with her elbows on her knees, a good thinking position, Harriet wondered whether it would be a wise move to consult the Canadian authorities. She decided to wait.

  CHAPTER 6

  Walking home from school, Harriet hummed. Seventh grade had begun, and as she had expected, Mr. Grenville was her homeroom teacher. He was a pleasant man with a whimsical (yes, thought Harriet, great word: whimsical) sense of humor and a large wardrobe of cashmere sweaters. She wondered how he could afford them all. Teachers, she knew, didn’t earn large salaries, and cashmere sweaters cost a lot of money. Her mother had a lot of them, and her father sometimes made remarks about the price.

  “Red and yellow, green and blue . . . ,” Harriet sang to herself, thinking of Mr. Grenville’s sweater collection and recalling the song about the rainbow that her class had learned in kindergarten. “All the colors that we know . . .” She waved to Fabio Dei Santi, driving past in his father’s grocery truck with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He beeped the horn at her. The entire Dei Santi family felt that Fabio was going to come to no good end, but Harriet felt in her heart that they were mistaken. Of course, being a spy, she knew some things that they didn’t know yet.

  She knew, for example, that Fabio Dei Santi was in love with Marie Delatorre, who worked in a bakery on Third Avenue. It had taken a lot of lurking, but Harriet had finally seen Fabio and Marie kissing, on July 17 at about 5:15 P.M. She had written it down. It had been quite a serious kiss (ninety-two seconds, timed by her stopwatch) and Harriet suspected that it meant the end of two things: it was the end of Fabio’s life of crime, the one his parents thought he was leading (“Santa Maria, what do I do to deserve a son like this, a school dropout, a bum?” Harriet had heard his mother say, wringing her hands in her apron); and it was also the end of Marie Delatorre’s life in a convent, the one her parents hoped she would lead.

  The whole concept of love fascinated Harriet. How did Fabio and Marie know they loved each other? How had it happened that their lives would change now and Fabio would become a husband and father instead of a car thief and con artist? Would it last for Fabio and Marie, the feeling that made them paste their lips together for ninety-two seconds? Harriet hoped so. She hoped that Marie Delatorre, probably soon to be Marie Dei Santi, would never end up alone and sighing, as Ole Golly had.

 
Harriet hoped that she would be invited to the wedding because she liked weddings, but if they didn’t invite her, she planned to crash it. It was fairly easy to crash weddings; Harriet did it often. She simply put on her best dress, went into the church, and sat toward the back, looking like a distant cousin.

  Receptions were harder to crash because they were usually some distance away, and people went there in cars and limos and taxis. Harriet didn’t have any transportation, but that didn’t matter. By walking she had crashed two wedding receptions at the Hotel Pierre, just to see what they were like. And she had decided that she liked wedding ceremonies, which were so wonderfully solemn, better than wedding receptions, which were frivolous.

  Lately, though, Harriet had noticed an increasing tendency of the congregation to applaud at the end of a wedding ceremony. It was inappropriate. It was like cheering for God as if he were an NFL coach. Harriet did not believe very strongly in either God or the Jets, but she respected other people’s beliefs and she did not think they should laugh and clap in church. She thought she might write a letter to The New York Times about it. Or perhaps she could phone the Pope.

  Thinking about weddings, Harriet stopped on the corner, took out her notebook, and leaned against a mailbox to write a note under THINGS TO DO.

  GET POPE’S TELEPHONE NUMBER FROM DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE.

  She realized with some embarrassment that she couldn’t remember the Pope’s name. John? Pius? Once, she had read a list of all the popes in the entire history of the church, and now they were mixed up in her mind. She remembered there had been one named Innocent.

  The name Innocent made her think of Ole Golly.

  Ole Golly had been back in New York now for four weeks. She barely left the house. One afternoon, at Harriet’s insistence, they had gone together to the Metropolitan Museum to see an exhibit of Etruscan jewelry. But they had not stayed long, and Ole Golly had refused to go into the gift shop, a great disappointment to Harriet, who had hoped to charge a reproduction gold-filigree-and-semiprecious-stone neckband to her mother’s account. (She thought she might go back to the museum on her own, especially if she received an invitation to the Dei Santi–Delatorre wedding. Her mother would want her to be properly attired for such an occasion, and Harriet thought the Etruscan neckband would go well with her blue vest and a white turtleneck.)