Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  Harriet started off. After a moment Sport sighed and ran to catch up with her. “Harriet,” he said, “it’ll be thirty-six blocks, because we’ll have to turn around and come back.”

  “Eighteen plus eighteen. You’re right.” Harriet strode forward. “Hurry, we’re losing her.”

  CHAPTER 11

  “COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS,” Sport read aloud, standing in front of the building. “That’s gotta be it. That’s where she was headed,” he said.

  They had lost sight of the cab carrying Ole Golly as they hurried down block after block. Now here they were, at her destination street—East Sixty-eighth—after their eighteen-block rush, but they had no idea where she was or which building she might have entered.

  “Really,” Sport said. “That really could be it.”

  Harriet stared at the sign and tried to figure out why Sport felt this was it. Carefully she wrote COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS in her notebook. She had started a page with the heading EAST 68TH STREET.

  “Why?” she asked Sport finally. “Why does that have to be it?”

  “Because she has some foreign relations! She has George Waldenstein up there in Canada.”

  It didn’t sound right to Harriet, though she wasn’t exactly certain why. “I don’t think that’s what it means, Sport,” she said finally, and turned away from the building. “I really don’t think she’s in there. But I’ll check.

  “Excuse me?” Harriet approached a man who was leaning against a post smoking a cigarette. He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Have you been here long?”

  The man nodded. He pointed toward his own feet, to show her the remains of three crushed cigarettes on the sidewalk.

  “Did you see a tall woman with a frowny face wearing tweed things go into this foreign relations building?

  “I’m an investigator,” Harriet added, in case he thought she was simply a nosy person. A lot of people thought that about Harriet.

  The man seemed to mull it over for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “A guy delivering a pizza went in. And then he came out. That’s all.”

  “Thank you,” Harriet said politely. “Come on, Sport. She must have gone someplace else on Sixty-eighth. Let’s see what else there is.”

  “My feet can’t take any more.” Sport stopped a few steps later and pointed at a building. “How about this?”

  “INDONESIAN CONSULATE,” Harriet read. “Could she be planning to run away to Indonesia?”

  “You can’t run there. You have to fly. It’s halfway around the world,” Sport pointed out. “I think it’s next to China.”

  “Ole Golly doesn’t like Chinese food. She says it has too many mysterious ingredients. I doubt if she’d go there.” Harriet wrote it down in her notebook anyway as she walked by.

  “CENTER FOR AFRICAN ART,” Sport read aloud. “I wonder if they have a bathroom.”

  “Sport! Don’t tell me you have to—”

  “I have to.”

  Guys, thought Harriet impatiently. Guys always went to the bathroom more often than girls. There was probably a physiological reason, Harriet suspected, but she hadn’t done any research. Maybe it could be her seventh-grade science project in the spring.

  When Sport finally emerged, looking more comfortable, they resumed their search.

  “Okay, you do one side and I’ll do the other. That way it will only take half as long.”

  They separated and each trudged down one side of the block. Then they met at the next corner to compare findings.

  Harriet carefully wrote down the names of all of the buildings on Sixty-eighth Street in her notebook. She underlined them.

  “This has to be it, Sport,” she said once they had gone through the list. “It wasn’t Indonesia, and it wasn’t the Center for African Art, and it wasn’t Judaica Silver.”

  “Or the Hellenic Medical Society,” Sport reminded her.

  “And there’s nothing else except the hospital buildings farther up. This must be it. It makes sense.”

  Together they looked solemnly at the information in Harriet’s notebook.

  DIVORCE MEDIATORS

  and

  CONFIDENTIAL SEARCH, INC., EMPLOYMENT AGENCY

  “First she gets herself divorced from George Waldenstein,” Harriet said. “Then she gets a job.”

  “But, Harriet,” Sport pointed out, “she already has a job. She works for your parents. She takes care of you.”

  “I’m twelve years and two weeks old, Sport,” Harriet pointed out. “Look at me. I’m on East Sixty-eighth Street. I walked here. I don’t need taking care of anymore.

  “Last year, after she left to go to Montreal, Ole Golly wrote me a letter. I memorized it.”

  Sport was listening.

  “I’m not going to tell you the intimate parts,” Harriet explained. “But it ended this way: ‘You don’t need me now. You’re eleven years old, which is old enough to get busy at growing up to be the person you want to be.’”

  Harriet and Sport stood silently for a moment.

  “What is the person you want to be, Harriet?” Sport asked.

  “Spy. Writer. Philanthropist. That’s all I’ve decided so far. How about you?”

  “Chef, and I don’t know what else,” Sport said. He looked down at his tired feet. “I guess I can eliminate toe dancer, though,” he added glumly.

  They turned, crossed the street, and began walking north. They didn’t talk at all.

  Then, suddenly, as they waited for the light to change so they could cross Seventy-ninth Street, Harriet turned to Sport. “It’s true, what Ole Golly said,” she told him. “I don’t need her now. But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “She needs me. I’m sure of it. She needs me for something, but I don’t know what. I can’t ask her. I actually tried to talk to her about the fact that she’s changed, but she just gets even more frowny. She tells me to leave her room. I’ve left her room when she’s asked, but I won’t leave the mystery of what she needs me for unsolved.”

  • • •

  That night Harriet, in her pajamas, unrolled her time line and inserted as a major entry under AGE TWELVE:

  BEGINS TO CONSIDER NEW YORK MARATHON

  “What’s that all about?” asked Ole Golly, peering down at it dubiously.

  “Well, I’m just considering it. I haven’t committed myself. But I walked a whole lot today. I think I might be in pretty good shape. Sport’s father ran in the marathon once, and he got his picture on TV.”

  “‘Fools’ names, like fools’ faces—’” Ole Golly replied.

  “I know,” Harriet said, and finished the quotation—“‘are often seen in public places.’”

  “Indeed,” Ole Golly said with a sniff, and returned to her room. For a moment she had seemed almost her old self, peering and quoting and sniffing. But Harriet wasn’t deceived. She’d noticed recently, for one thing, that Ole Golly was walking very slowly, with her shoulders slumped. This was not at all in character; Ole Golly had always been a posture nut, a champion of straight shoulders and brisk step—and also, the peering and sniffing had been halfhearted. Ole Golly wasn’t really interested in Harriet’s thoughts about the marathon. She was simply going through the motions. Her mind and her heart were clearly someplace else.

  But where? In Montreal with George Waldenstein, who was still alive, according to Sport, but whom Ole Golly absolutely refused to discuss?

  Or were her thoughts on East Sixty-eighth Street, which Harriet now knew was an extremely meaningful site?

  For a moment Harriet thought about approaching Ole Golly’s closed door. She looked down at her feet, which were bare and clean, just out of the bathtub. Harriet liked her feet. They were sturdy and symmetrical, and they had just walked her thirty-six blocks without complaining, unlike Sport’s much more pitiful feet, which Harriet had once noticed had oddly shaped big toes.

  Harriet tried to command her feet through telepathy to stand and walk firmly to Ole Golly�
�s door. She tried to order her right hand to make a fist and thump loudly on the door. She tried to command her voice to say in a forthright, forceful way, “Ole Golly, the time has come. We must talk. I demand to know what is happening!”

  But her body did not respond. Her clean pink feet did not stand. Her right hand simply continued to hold the pen with which she had been writing on the time line. And her voice, instead of barking out a forceful statement, simply got swallowed up in a timid, uncertain little cough.

  What kind of spy am I, anyway? Harriet asked herself in despair. A decent, self-respecting spy would be able to make her feet march across to that door.

  But she knew that a loud, demanding thump on that door followed by a forthright, demanding question would cause Ole Golly pain. Not that Ole Golly would ever, ever admit it. No. She would be stoic and sensible, Harriet knew, and she would likely send Harriet off to bed in a firm and slightly scolding voice with a reminder to hang up the damp towel draped over the toilet seat.

  But she would be hurt and disappointed and her privacy would be invaded if Harriet thumped on that door. It was not the appropriate course of action, even for the most stalwart spy. So Harriet sighed and thought things through as she rolled up her time line for the night.

  Seated on her bed, Harriet opened her notebook and began to make a list of clues.

  1. OLE GOLLY LEFT GEORGE WALDENSTEIN (WHO IS ALIVE) AND CAME TO NEW YORK.

  2. SHE IS SAD AND DEPRESSED AND GROUCHY AND UNWELL.

  3. SHE STARTED GOING REGULARLY TO DR. FEIGENBAUM.

  4. SHE TAKES SOMETHING TO DR. FEIGENBAUM EVERY VISIT.

  5. SHE WENT SOMEPLACE ON EAST 68TH STREET, AND TOOK A WAITING-ROOM MAGAZINE WITH HER.

  6. SHE PLANS TO MOVE TO HER MOTHER’S IN DECEMBER.

  7. SHE SAYS SHE IS INNOCENT.

  8. HER THOUGHTS AND ATTENTION ARE ON SOMETHING ELSE.

  9. SHE IS ON A DIET.

  10. SHE REFUSES TO WEAR THE SILK DRESS MY MOTHER GAVE HER LAST CHRISTMAS.

  11. SHE TAKES A LOT OF NAPS.

  Harriet looked at the list, trying to decide what else to add, or whether she could rearrange the elements so they fell into a different order. Suddenly she saw an answer emerging. It was astounding, but if she added a few details that now seemed important, reworded some of the items, then deleted number 7, which still made no sense to her—

  1. OLE GOLLY LEFT GEORGE WALDENSTEIN AND CAME TO NEW YORK IN MID-AUGUST.

  2. SHE IS SAD AND DEPRESSED AND GROUCHY AND UNWELL.

  3. SHE STARTED GOING REGULARLY TO SEE DR. FEIGENBAUM IN SEPTEMBER.*

  4. SHE TAKES SOMETHING IN A BAG TO DR. FEIGENBAUM EVERY VISIT. (???)

  5. SHE WENT ON A DIET, ALSO IN SEPTEMBER, AND STARTED TAKING NAPS.

  6. SHE REFUSED TO WEAR THE BLUE SILK DRESS UNTIL THE SPRING.

  7. SHE WENT SOMEPLACE WITH A WAITING ROOM IN EARLY NOVEMBER. (???)

  8. SHE PLANS TO MOVE TO HER MOTHER’S IN DECEMBER.

  9. HER THOUGHTS AND ATTENTION ARE ON SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING THAT HASN’T HAPPENED YET.

  Harriet read the new list. Numbers 4 and 7 remained mysteries, so she deleted them in her mind. When she read the other items on the list, ignoring number 4 and number 7, everything fell into place and Harriet saw to her amazement exactly what was happening. It was so incredibly clear—but at the same time so incredibly unbelievable. Harriet was amazed that she hadn’t figured it out before.

  She decided to check out one very simple thing, the thing she had asterisked. Still in her pajamas, she put on her hiking boots and a heavy jacket and found her flashlight. Then she tiptoed down the stairs and quietly let herself out the front door.

  Across the dark street Harriet stealthily climbed the front steps of the Feigenbaums’ brownstone and stood next to the wrought-iron railing from which she had once toppled into the flowerbed. She clicked on the low beam of her flashlight and aimed it so it illuminated the bronze plaque to the left of the door, the plaque that said MORRIS FEIGENBAUM, M.D., and below it in smaller letters, PSYCHIATRY.

  Harriet stood there in the same place where she had seen Ole Golly through her binoculars, where she had seen Ole Golly ring the Feigenbaums’ doorbell and speak into the intercom.

  Then she aimed her light a little higher, at the other bronze plaque, the one that had always been there, the one that quite clearly spelled out, in English, the information Harriet had ignored for much too long (The clue in the most obvious place! A Sherlock Holmes story had used the same device!): BARBARA FEIGENBAUM, M.D. Harriet hadn’t been particularly interested in this doctor who dealt with women’s medical problems. Psychiatry seemed more interesting. But now, below, in smaller letters, she read: OBSTETRICS AND GYNECOLOGY.

  Ole Golly, Harriet realized, was going to have a baby.

  CHAPTER 12

  Harriet tried to think what to do now that she had figured out Ole Golly’s secret.

  Once, when Harriet was much younger and briefly attracted to dolls, a state of mind that had lasted about five minutes, her mother had bought her a tiny doll carriage and a doll cradle and a lot of fluffy doll clothes. The collection, Harriet remembered, had included teensy undershirts. She had played with everything one rainy afternoon in her room. While she was trying in frustration to force the stiff arm of a doll into one of the little knit undershirts, Harriet had glanced over toward her bedroom bookcase and noticed a copy of Little House on the Prairie, which she had received for her seventh birthday but had not yet read.

  She remembered that she had thought suddenly, What would I rather be doing? Putting a dumb undershirt on a doll and then putting the doll into a little bed and pretending it goes to sleep so that then it will wake up and I can put a different undershirt on it? Or reading a book?

  Harriet had given up dolls that very instant.

  Babies, she knew, were not like dolls. They had bendable arms and loud cries and wet, gurgly smiles, and you could not leave them in a corner of the bedroom in a heap while you went to the movies. You could not leave them in a corner in a heap for one single minute, ever. They needed stuff. They needed food, and—

  What was it, Harriet thought suddenly, that Ole Golly had said not terribly long ago? Something about what every child needs? It had made her seem very sad at the time.

  Adequate health care was one thing. Well, Ole Golly’s baby would probably have that, even if it had to live in Far Rockaway. They had vitamins in Far Rockaway.

  Access to education. It would have that, too. Ole Golly had gone to public school and learned good penmanship and lots of poetry. Her baby could do the same.

  What was the third thing? The thing that had made Ole Golly turn away and rush to her room?

  Strictness. Well, her baby would certainly have that. Ole Golly would be nagging it about manners and posture all the time.

  But it wasn’t just strict that she had said, Harriet recalled. It was strict and loving. Not a problem. Ole Golly loved everything except Chinese food and violent movies.

  Then Harriet remembered. Parents. Strict but loving parents was what Ole Golly had said. That was why she had rushed away and closed her door and maybe even cried.

  That was the source of Ole Golly’s sadness. Her baby wouldn’t have parents.

  Unless Harriet M-for-middle Welsch stepped in.

  She decided to think of a way to make things right.

  • • •

  “Bonjour, ma petite!”

  “Hello, Mother,” Harriet said into the phone. Automatically she looked at her watch.

  “What time—”

  “It’s one in the afternoon.” Harriet had given up trying to make her mother remember the time difference.

  “And the day is? I’m testing your français, darling.”

  “Dimanche.” Sunday. Harriet had learned the days of the week in fifth grade.

  “And the date?”

  “Ah, let me think. Novembre. Le septe.” The seventh. “How are you, Mother? And Daddy?”

  “Nous sommes très, très
—Oh damn, Harriet, I can’t think of it in French. We’re just fine.”

  Harriet twiddled her marking pen. She was sitting cross-legged in the hall at the top of the stairs. Her time line was once again extended across the floor, weighted at each end to hold it flat, and she was sitting with her behind on AGE SIX. She had been adding a notation called APPEARANCE under each age, with a one-word description, and was thinking about gluing on a photograph as well, though she was afraid glued snapshots might make it difficult to roll up the time line.

  “Can you think of a one-word description of me at age eight, Mother?”

  “Age eight? Let me think. That would have been four years ago. You were intelligent, industrious, organized—”

  “Appearance, Mother.”

  “Oh, well, let me think. That was the year you grew so much but didn’t gain any weight. So you were very thin for a while. I guess I would say string bean.”

  Harriet’s pen had been poised under AGE EIGHT: APPEARANCE, but she could not bring herself to write a vegetable there.

  “String bean is two words. Could you think of just one?”

  “Tall,” Harriet’s mother said.

  “Could you maybe think of a more interesting adjective than just tall?”

  “Thin.”

  Harriet sighed and put her pen down.

  “Darling, I’m glad I’ve been helpful with your project, but that’s not really why I called. Guess what?”

  “What?” Harriet was trying to think of a better word than tall, but nothing was coming to mind except elongated, and that just didn’t seem right.

  “We’ve made our reservations to come home! Your father’s work here is just about finished. We’ll fly back to New York on the twenty-second. The vingt—oh dear, the vingt—”

  “Vingt-deux,” Harriet supplied. In her mind she was thinking: beanstalk? But that was not an adjective. Beanstalkish? She didn’t like the sound or look of it.

  “So we’ll be there just before Thanksgiving! In time for a real celebration! Is Miss Golly around, Harriet?”

  “She’s in her room. I think she’s taking a nap.”