Harriet Spies Again

by Louise Fitzhugh

  “A nap! It’s seven P.M., Harriet! Why is she taking a nap?”

  “Mother, it’s six hours earlier here.”

  “Of course it is. Silly me. Knock on her door, darling. I want her to make some arrangements for a big Thanksgiving dinner. I’m going to have her invite the Connellys. Their boys will be home from school—”

  Harriet groaned.

  “Be sweet, darling, Sylvia Connelly is my dearest friend.”

  “Well, if we have to have the Connellys, could we invite Sport?”

  “Simon? Of course. And his lovely father.”

  “His father’s married now. So can we invite his lovely stepmother, too? Her name is Kate. They could bring pies.”

  “Of course, darling!”

  Harriet had been pondering and pondering Ole Golly’s problem. “Mother,” she said tentatively, “if I invite one other person as a sort of surprise guest, would that be all right?”

  She heard silence on the telephone. Finally her mother said, “Darling, I don’t think a homeless person would fit in very comfortably with the Connellys.”

  “Not one of the homeless, Mother. Not this time. It’s a homed person. I humbly beg.”

  “Oh dear. Someone from school, I assume. I suppose so, Harriet, but do make certain it’s someone with good manners.”

  “It is, Mother, I promise. This person has extremely good manners. Very old-fashioned.”

  “All right, then. Get Miss Golly now, would you, darling?”

  Harriet reached over and tapped on Ole Golly’s door. “Could you come and talk to my mother on the phone?” she called. She heard Ole Golly’s footsteps, and after a moment the door opened. Ole Golly was wearing her tweed bathrobe and her hair was flattened on one side. She blinked. Harriet handed her the telephone.

  “Before you start talking to my mother, could you give me a one-word description of me at age eight? An adjective?”

  Ole Golly looked down at the time line. She wrinkled her forehead the way she always did when she was thinking hard. “Lissome,” she said after a moment. “You were quite lissome at eight.”

  It was exactly right. “Thank you, dearest Ole Golly!” Harriet said enthusiastically. She rose to her knees and spread her arms in a dramatic gesture.

  Ole Golly, holding the telephone, backed away with a look of dismay. “No hugging,” she said firmly.

  • • •

  Harriet chewed on her tomato sandwich and half-listened to her school friends talking in the lunchroom.

  “What are you guys doing for Thanksgiving?” Beth Ellen asked. “We have to go out to our house in Water Mill. It’s going to be so boring.”

  “We’re going to my grandparents’ in Scarsdale,” Carrie Andrews said. “We do that every Thanksgiving. All my cousins are always there. And this year it won’t be boring at all because my cousin Kathleen just dropped out of Vassar to be a singer with a band so everybody’s all upset. There will be a lot of yelling.”

  “What band?” Beth Ellen asked.

  “Yeah, what band?” Rachel asked. Everyone looked very interested. Harriet finished her last bite of sandwich and stared out the window, thinking about how boring talk about bands was.

  Carrie shrugged. “It’s called Pustule but nobody’s ever heard of it. And they’re not even paying Kathleen anything. My uncle Harold says he’s cutting off her allowance.”

  “She’ll end up a homeless person,” Beth Ellen said. “That’s really awful. She should stay at college.”

  Everyone nodded. Everyone except Harriet. Harriet’s mother had graduated from Vassar and Harriet had never figured out why that was such a fine thing. She thought she would probably drop out, too, if they made her go there. Harriet had no interest in being a band singer—it would interfere with her plans to become a spy, and anyway, she couldn’t carry a tune very well—but she definitely thought people should pursue their dreams.

  She said it aloud. “People should pursue their dreams.”

  “Even if they take your allowance away?” Carrie asked in amazement.

  “Even if,” Harriet said. “I know I’m going to pursue my dreams.” She began to crumple her napkin and lunch bag.

  “‘Dreams,’” a voice said behind her, “‘which are the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy—’”

  Harriet sighed. Only one person besides Ole Golly was in the habit of quoting all the time. She recognized the voice of her homeroom teacher, who also taught English and coached the drama club. “Is that Shakespeare?” she asked suspiciously, turning around. “It sounds like Shakespeare.”

  “Romeo and Juliet, act one, scene four,” Mr. Grenville replied with a cheerful grin. He was wearing a teal-blue cashmere sweater today, and a bow tie with yellow polka dots.

  “I don’t have an idle brain,” Harriet told him.

  “You certainly don’t, Harriet,” he said. “You have a working-overtime brain and a very good heart as well. That’s why I was looking for you. I need your help with something.”

  Harriet tossed her crumpled papers toward the trash can and missed. From behind the lunch counter, Mrs. McNair, who served hot lunch, glared at her. Mrs. McNair always glared at Harriet because she thought a steady diet of tomato sandwiches was unhealthy. “Greens,” she always muttered when Harriet walked past. “You need greens.”

  “Yammer yammer yammer,” Harriet always murmured in reply.

  She picked up her trash from the floor and deposited it in the container. “What do you need help with?” she asked Mr. Grenville as she followed him from the lunchroom. “I mean, ‘In what way might I be of assistance to your admirable self?’ That’s Shakespeare.”

  “Baloney,” Mr. Grenville said with a grin. “What play?”

  Harriet thought quickly. “Ah, Much Ado about Midsummer,” she said. “Act seven.”

  He laughed. “Good fake, Harriet! You really do have a working-overtime brain. And by the time you finish at this school I will have drummed some Shakespeare into it so that you won’t have to fake it.”

  “I’m getting better at faking, though, aren’t I?” She followed Mr. Grenville into his empty classroom.

  “Yes, you’re quite good. You have a devious mind. You’ll be an excellent secret agent.” Harriet had written her sixth-grade Career Day report on the world of espionage.

  Career Day had been a disappointment to Harriet. Adults—many of them parents of students, or aunts or uncles—had come to describe their careers to Gregory School students. There had been two doctors, one of whom had to leave in the middle of a panel discussion because she was called away by an emergency; an architect, who showed drawings and talked much too much about elevations; a retired baseball manager; an aging Broadway star who wore too much makeup (she was someone’s grandmother); a man who owned a seafood restaurant; two professors of political science; one chemist; and seventeen lawyers. There were also three writers, and Harriet attended their panel discussion because she did plan to include writing as a part of her career. But the writers (one was Sport’s father) were all shy, and they mumbled. And there had not been a single spy. Not one.

  Mr. Grenville was looking through his briefcase, which he stored under his desk. “Here,” he said, pulling out some papers. He placed the papers in a folder. “I was cleaning out my filing cabinet and I came across these papers that I should have returned to Simon Rocque at the end of school last June. I know he’s a friend of yours, Harriet. I wonder if you could give these to him.”

  Harriet took the folder. “Sure,” she said. “I see him all the time. He’s coming to my house for Thanksgiving, actually, with his father and stepmother. They’re bringing the pies.”

  “Really?” Mr. Grenville looked surprised. “I thought your parents were in France, Harriet. I was wondering if maybe you’d fly over to Paris for Thanksgiving. I was jealous, actually.”

  “Nope. They’re coming back on Wednesday the twenty-second, the day before Thanksgiving. So we’re having a big Thanksgiving dinner a
t our house, and the Rocques are coming, and also”—Harriet sighed—“the Connellys.”

  “You don’t sound enthusiastic about the Connellys.”

  “They have rude sons,” Harriet explained, “named for Shakespeare characters.”

  Mr. Grenville looked interested. “Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Ah, Duncan and Horatio?”

  “No, Malcolm and Edmund. They’re both really finks. But Sylvia Connelly is my mother’s best friend, so sometimes we have to put up with her children.” She tucked the folder into her backpack. “And I hope one other person is coming, but I haven’t invited him yet.”

  Mr. Grenville glanced at his watch. “Almost time for class,” he said. “So I won’t keep you. But I wanted to ask you one other favor, Harriet.” He opened his desk drawer and began to look through some papers.

  “Sure.”

  “After the Thanksgiving break, we have a new student entering school. She’ll be in my homeroom, along with you and all your friends. It’s very unusual to enter the Gregory School midyear. But apparently there are some difficult circumstances. Anyway, I was hoping you’d be willing to take her under your wing, Harriet.”

  Under my wing? Harriet thought. She pictured the page in her notebook she had titled DUMB PHRASES.

  She decided that at the first possible opportunity she would add UNDER YOUR WING to the list. But she said, “Of course,” politely to Mr. Grenville.

  “Here,” he said, finding the official paper he’d been looking for in his desk drawer. “Her name is—let’s see—Annie. Annie Smith. And, what else, she’s twelve years old, her health is good, and blah blah blah. Here: under interests it says she likes to read. That’s what made me think of you. If her interest had been science, I would have asked Janie to look out for her, or if her interest had been fashion, I would have asked—”

  “Rachel, Carrie, Marion, Laura—”

  “Right.” He laughed. “Okay, thanks, Harriet. I knew I could count on you.”

  That one would go on her list, too, Harriet thought. COUNT ON YOU. Right below UNDER YOUR WING.

  She turned to go.

  “Carry on,” Mr. Grenville said cheerfully.

  That one, too: CARRY ON. Harriet searched her list for the appropriate reply.

  “You betcha,” she said.

  • • •

  “Hi, H’spy!”

  “Oh, hello! I wasn’t expecting you to call,” Harriet said. “I thought I always had to call you, and give that one-ring signal.”

  “Well, I was bored, and hoping you would call, but you didn’t.”

  “I started to,” Harriet explained, “but the weather’s so awful that I knew I couldn’t come meet you in the alley.”

  “Look through your bedroom window, toward my house,” Rosarita said.

  “Wait.” Harriet stretched the telephone cord and went to her window. Outside it was raining and cold. But through the rain, across the street, she could see Rosarita Sauvage in a third-floor window. Harriet waved.

  “Is that your bedroom?” Harriet asked.

  “My cell.”

  Harriet gulped. She wondered if perhaps psychiatrists sometimes had locked wards in their homes for mentally ill patients.

  “But you go to school. And you can go out in the yard, and you’ve met me in the alley. Do they just lock you up at night? And how come they let you have a telephone?”

  “Don’t pry, H’spy.”

  “Well,” Harriet added, after a pause, “thank you for calling. I hope you have a nice Thanksgiving.”

  “Wait, don’t hang up!”

  Harriet realized suddenly that she had the same feeling about Rosarita Sauvage that she did about Ole Golly. Beneath their grouchy and abrupt exteriors, Harriet understood, they were lonely. And frightened.

  CHAPTER 13

  “I can’t believe it’s snowing,” Harriet said to Cook and Ole Golly at breakfast. From the kitchen window, high up on the wall, she could watch people’s booted feet make their way with difficulty through deep slush. The last two days of school before Thanksgiving vacation had been canceled when the cold rain had turned to relentless snow.

  “The weather patterns are changing everywhere,” Ole Golly commented, looking up from the newspaper. “Tens of millions of people may be forced from low-lying areas as the seas rise. I read it in the paper last week.”

  “The seas rise? You read that?” said Cook. She set down a bowl of fresh cranberries. She’d been picking through them, discarding the wrinkled ones, preparing to cook them with orange slices and cinnamon to create her special cranberry sauce. It was still two days until Thanksgiving, but Cook always began her preparations early.

  “Humanity is responsible,” Ole Golly said. “The article blames humanity.” She turned a page of the paper and sipped her tea.

  “You and I are part of humanity,” Harriet pointed out, “and we didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t know why they blame us. We recycle.”

  “Maybe it’s all that paper you’re wasting with those notebooks of yours,” accused Cook. “How many notebooks have you gone through now? Must be hundreds. You’re killing trees left and right.” Cook emphasized this by throwing first her left arm and then her right out to her sides, endangering the spice rack and making Harriet quite indignant.

  “Well, you’re the one polluting the air with all your cigarette smoke,” Harriet shot back. “And there’s enough onion in your meat loaf to choke a horse!”

  “That’s quite enough now,” Ole Golly said. “We have a lot of things to do to prepare for Thanksgiving. Get to work.”

  “I’m going to set the table with Mother’s best tablecloth and silverware. Tell me again how many people.” Harriet took her cereal bowl to the sink.

  Cook picked up the bowl of cranberries and set to work again. “You and your mama and daddy,” she said. “That’s three.”

  “Sport and his father and Kate,” Harriet added. “That makes six.”

  “The Connellys.” Ole Golly said it with disdain.

  “Yes, the Connellys, all four of them. That’s ten,” Harriet said. “And Mother gave me permission to invite another person, so that’s eleven. And you and Cook make thirteen. I’m going to use those white plates with the gold edge.”

  “Count me out,” Cook said. “With all these people coming, I’ll be so busy in the kitchen, I’ll be lucky to sit down at all.”

  “Make it eleven places, Harriet,” Ole Golly said. “I’ll keep Cook company in the kitchen.”

  “Why?” Harriet asked.

  “I won’t want to eat much. And I’m not feeling very sociable lately.” She reached for the Lincoln Center coffee mug by the telephone and found a pencil. Then she folded The New York Times so the crossword puzzle was positioned just right. There was no talking to Ole Golly, Harriet knew, once she had started the puzzle.

  • • •

  “Why exactly aren’t you feeling sociable lately, Ole Golly?” Harriet asked that afternoon. She had waited for a quiet moment. The crossword puzzle was completed. The table was set for eleven people, and Harriet had even made place cards and arranged them so Malcolm and Edmund Connelly would be as far away from her as possible.

  Now they were sitting in the library after their snack. There was a fire in the fireplace, and outside snow still swirled and wind whistled in the street. Cook, bundled into boots and scarf and heavy down coat, had left early to make her way to Brooklyn by subway.

  “What if you can’t get back, Cooky? I don’t know how to make stuffing. Maybe you should spend the night here tonight,” Harriet had suggested as Cook zipped her plush-lined boots.

  But Cook shook her head. “I got here this morning, and I’ll get back tomorrow. The subway will be running. But I have to be home tonight to get Junior’s dinner. He’s had a bad attitude lately. I think he’s been eating junk food.”

  Harriet thought about the children she might have if she decided to have children. Vladimir and Francesca. What if they were pale and weak, like Pinky Wh
itehead? Or snobby and materialistic, like Rachel and Marion? What if, like Junior, they had a personality disorder? Or talked dirty, like the Connellys? What if they stole? Oh dear. According to Cook, a mother would love them anyway, no matter what, but it would certainly be hard. According to Cook, it wasn’t always easy to be a mother. Maybe, Harriet decided, she would devote her life solely to spying.

  She wondered what kind of mother Ole Golly would be. Sport had gotten along with no real mother just fine. But Ole Golly wanted her child to have parents. She decided not to think about this now.

  Ole Golly was just finishing the final part of Harriet’s sweater, the left sleeve. Harriet had held her arm out for measuring several times. Her left arm, she had discovered, was a quarter of an inch shorter than her right. This was an interesting anatomical fact. Harriet had always admired the symmetry of her feet, but now she was concerned that it might be an optical illusion and that her feet might not actually match. She intended to measure all the other parts of her body to see if the same discrepancy occurred, and if it did, she was going to write to the American Medical Association about it. So far she had only done her nostrils, and they seemed to be equal, though it was hard to tell with nostrils because they didn’t exactly hold still. That was why there were so many interesting nostril verbs, like quiver and flare.

  Ole Golly sighed when Harriet asked why she wasn’t feeling sociable. “Because I’m tired,” she said, and knit a few more stitches.

  Harriet had hoped that Ole Golly was ready to confess, to say, “Because I’m pregnant, because I am bringing an innocent child into the world in a dumpy house in Far Rockaway where my mother says ain’t,” and then she and Harriet could discuss it. Harriet watched the cuff of the sweater turn slowly in Ole Golly’s hands. She tried to maneuver the conversation.

  “Are you tired of your job?” she asked after a moment.

  “My job? I don’t have a job,” Ole Golly said, lifting her eyebrows. Harriet noticed that Ole Golly’s eyebrows seemed to be exactly the same size. She wondered about her own and glanced toward the tape measure.

  “Yes, you do. Taking care of me.”