Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris & Mrs. Harris Goes to New York

by Paul Gallico

  ‘Moderation is the signpost to health,’ declared Mr Bayswater somewhat sententiously.

  ‘Go on with you, John,’ said Mrs Harris, using his Christian name for the first time. ‘Did you ever eat a North Country flapjack?’

  After he had got over the initial shock of hearing his first name thus falling from the lips of a female of the species, Mr Bayswater smiled a kind of a greyish, wintry smile, and said, ‘Well, perhaps I haven’t, Ada. But I’ll tell you what we’ll do, since you rather fancy your stomach; there’s a Howard Johnson’s about five miles ahead, and we’ll stop there for a snack. Did you ever eat New England clam chowder? You’ll be sick again, I’ll warrant. It’s the best in the world. And for the nipper there’s ice cream. Howard Johnson’s has thirty-seven different varieties of ice cream.’

  ‘Lumme,’ marvelled Mrs Harris, ‘thirty-seven kinds! There ain’t that many flavours to make ice cream of. Would you believe that ’Enry?’

  Henry looked up at Mr Bayswater with great trust and confidence. ‘If ’e says so,’ he replied.

  They pulled up to the red and white Howard Johnson restaurant at the edge of the Turnpike, where hundreds of cars were similarly lined up and nosed in like pigs at a trough, and there they sat and sampled Lucullan bits of American roadside gastronomy.

  This time, however, it was not Mrs Harris, but little Henry, who was sick. He had got successfully through nine of the famous Howard Johnson flavours before the tenth - huckleberry liquorice - threw him. But after he had been cleaned up he was as good as new, and piling back into the Rolls-Royce they proceeded merrily northwards towards the great metropolis on the Hudson.

  On the final lap Mr Bayswater regaled Mrs Harris with accounts of little Henry’s popularity among the diplomatic set before the chicken-pox laid him low and curbed his activities, which seemed to include running faster and leaping and jumping further and higher than the scions of the ambassadors of Spain, Sweden, Indonesia, Ghana, Finland, and the Low Countries.

  ‘My word,’ said Mrs Harris. And then, throwing a wink over little Henry’s head at Mr Bayswater, said, ‘But ’ow come they didn’t twig that little ’Enry wasn’t - I mean— ?’

  ‘Hoh!’ scoffed Mr Bayswater, ‘how would they? They can’t speak the King’s English any better themselves. A leader, that’s what that boy’s going to be.’

  Little Henry here broke one of his long silences. ‘I liked the Easter party on the lawn best,’ he confided to Mrs Harris. ‘We had to ’unt Easter eggs that was hidden, and we had egg races on a spoon. Uncle Ike said I was the best of anybody, and some day I’d be a champion.’

  ‘Did ’e now?’ said Mrs Harris. ‘That was nice. ’Oo did you say said that - Uncle Ike? ’Oo’s Uncle Ike?’

  ‘I dunno,’ replied little Henry. ‘ ’E was a kind of bald-headed bloke, and a bit of all right. ’E knew I was from London right away.’

  ‘He is referring to the President of the United States and the annual Easter party for the children of the members of the Diplomatic Corps on the White House lawn,’ explained Mr Bayswater just a trifle loftily. ‘Mr Eisenhower conducted the ceremonies personally. I stood that close to him meself,’ lapsing again at the mere memory of the event. ‘We exchanged a few words.’

  ‘Lor’ love yer - the two of yer ’ob-nobbing with Presidents! I once was almost close enough to the Queen to touch - Christmas shopping at ’Arrods.’

  The Rolls was purring - it seemed almost floating - over the steel and concrete tracery of the great Skyway over the Jersey marshes. In the distance, shining in the late afternoon spring sunshine, gleamed the turrets of Manhattan. The sun was caught by the finger tower atop the Empire State Building, glinted from the silvered steel spike terminating the Chrysler Building further uptown, more than a thousand feet above the street level, and sometimes was caught illuminating every window of the burnished walls of the R.C.A. and other buildings in mid-town New York, until they literally seemed on fire.

  Mrs Harris feasted her eyes upon the distant spectacle before they plunged into the caverns of the Lincoln Tunnel and murmured, ‘Coo, and I thought the Eiffel Tower was somefink!’ She was thinking, Who would ever have thought that Ada Harris of five Willis Gardens, Battersea, would be sitting in a Rolls-Royce next to such a kind and elegant gentleman, a real, proper gent - Mr John Bayswater - looking with her own eyes upon such a sight as New York? And the greying little chauffeur was thinking, Whoever would have thought that Mr John Bayswater, of Bayswater, would be watching the expression of delight and joy upon the face of a little transplanted London char as she gazed upon one of the grandest and most beautiful spectacles in the world, instead of keeping both eyes on the congested road, and his ears attuned only to the voices of his vehicle?

  Mrs Harris had the chauffeur drop them for safety’s sake at the corner of Madison Avenue, and as they said good bye and she expressed her thanks for the ride and the meal, Mr Bayswater was surprised to hear himself say, ‘I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing you again.’ And then added, ‘Good luck with the nipper. I hope you find his parent. You might let us know - the Marquis will be interested.’

  Mrs Harris said blithely, ‘If you’re ever up this way again, get on the blower - Sacramento 9-9900. We might go to the flicks at the Music ’All. It’s me fyvourite plyce. Mrs Butterfield and me go every Thursday.’

  ‘If you’re ever in Washington, look us up,’ said Mr Bayswater, ‘the Marquis will be glad to see you.’

  ‘Righty-ho.’ She and little Henry stood on the corner and watched him merge into the stream of traffic. In the Rolls Mr Bayswater watched the two of them in his rear vision mirror until he came that close to touching fenders with a Yellow Taxi, and the exchange of pleasantries with the driver thereof, who called him ‘a Limey so-and-so’, brought him back to the world of realities and Rolls-Royces.

  Mrs Harris nipped into a drugstore and telephoned Mrs Butterfield to notify her of their arrival and ascertain whether the coast was clear.

  THE introducing of little Henry Brown into the servants’ quarters of the Schreiber penthouse at 650 Park Avenue presented no problems whatsoever. Mrs Harris simply escorted him thither through the delivery entrance on Sixty-ninth Street, up the service elevator, and through the back door of the huge flat.

  Nor would keeping him there have presented any insurmountable difficulties, trained as he was to self-effacement. The Schreibers never entered the servants’ quarters; they never used the back way into the apartment. There was an abundance of food at all times in the huge freezing units and iceboxes into which a child would make no appreciable dent, and since he was a silent little chap he might have gone undetected there indefinitely, but for the unfortunate effect that his presence had upon the nerves of Mrs Butterfield.

  Well accustomed by now to the ways of American supermarkets and delivery men, no longer frightened by the giantism of the city, delighted with the dollars she was amassing, Mrs Butterfield had allowed herself to be lulled into a sense of false security by the protracted absence of little Henry among the diplomatic set in Washington. Now his return and physical presence on the premises put an end to that. All her fears, nervous tremors, worries, and prophecies of doom and disaster returned, and in double measure, for there now seemed no possible solution, happy ending or, for that matter, an ending of any kind but disaster to the impasse.

  With the return of Mrs Harris from Kenosha, Wisconsin, bearing the ill tidings that this Brown was not the father of the boy, and her subsequent failure to make any progress in discovering him, Mrs Butterfield could see only execution or dungeons and durance vile staring them in the face. They had kidnapped a child in broad daylight in the streets of London, they had stowed him away on an ocean liner without paying his fare or keep, they had smuggled him into the United States of America - a capital crime, obviously, from all the precautions taken to prevent it - and now they were compounding all previous felonies by concealing him in the home of their employers. All of this could only end in a catastrophe of cat
aclysmic proportions.

  Unhappily, it was in her cooking that the effects of strain began to show.

  Salt and sugar were frequently interchanged; syrup and vinegar got themselves mysteriously mixed; soufflés either fell flat or blew up; sauces curdled; and roasts burned. Her delicate sense of timing went completely to pot so that she could no longer produce a four-minute egg that was not either raw or stone hard. Her coffee grew watery, her toast cindery - she could not even make an honest British cup of tea any more.

  As for the State banquets she was called upon to prepare for the entertainment of Mr Schreiber’s celebrated employees, they beggared description, and people who once were eager to be asked to one of the Schreiber evenings now invented every kind of excuse to absent themselves from the horrors that appeared from Mrs Butterfield’s kitchen.

  Nor was it any satisfaction to Mrs Schreiber, to Mrs Harris, or to Mrs Butterfield that the only one who now seemed contented was Kentucky Claiborne, who when a particularly charred roast accompanied by a quite appallingly over-salted and over-thickened gravy appeared on the table, dug into it with both elbows flying, and bawled, ‘Say Henrietta, this is more like it. Ah reckon you must have fired that old bag you had in the kitchen and got yourself a hundred per cent American cook. Ah’ll just have some more of that there spoon gravy.’

  Naturally, all this did not happen at once. It was a more gradual deterioration than as narrated, but with a sudden acceleration as Mrs Butterfield, herself aware of her sins of omission and commission, grew only the more nervous and upset, and of course from then on things worsened rapidly, until Mr Schreiber felt called upon to ask his wife, ‘See here, Henrietta, what’s got into that pair you dragged over here from London? We ain’t had a decent meal in two weeks. How am I going to ask anybody here for dinner any more?’

  Mrs Schreiber said, ‘But everything was going along so fine at first - and she seemed to be such a wonderful cook.’

  ‘Well, she ain’t now,’ said Mr Schreiber, ‘and if I were you I’d get her out of here before she poisons someone.’

  Mrs Schreiber pressed Mrs Harris on the subject, and for the first time found the little charwoman, of whom she was genuinely fond, not entirely cooperative. When she asked, ‘Tell me, Mrs Harris, is anything wrong with Mrs Butterfield?’ she got only a curious look and a reply, ‘ ’Oo, Violet? Not ’er. Violet’s one of the best.’

  Mrs Harris herself was in a fearful dilemma, torn between affection for and loyalty to her kind employer, and love and even greater loyalty to her lifelong friend, who she knew was making a walloping failure of her job, and likewise why. What was she to do, besides what she had been doing, which was to implore Mrs Butterfield to pull herself together, only to be deluged by a flood of reproaches for the fix they were in, and predictions of swift retribution? She herself had not been blind to the deterioration in Mrs Butterfield’s art, and the dissatisfaction at the table, and was aware now of a new danger that threatened them, namely that Mr Schreiber would order them both deported to London. If this happened before the finding of little Henry’s father, then they were really for it, for Mrs Harris had no illusions about being able to smuggle him back as they had brought him over. Such a caper would work once, but never twice.

  Mrs Harris knew that she had erred in not taking Mrs Schreiber into her confidence immediately, and it flustered her to the point where she did the wrong thing. On top of giving Mrs Schreiber a short and unsatisfactory answer, she then went out for a walk on Park Avenue to try to think things out and keep the situation from deteriorating still further.

  Thus she was not present when for the first time Mrs Schreiber invaded the labyrinth of her own servants’ quarters to have a heart-to-heart talk with Mrs Butterfield, and if possible ascertain the psychological causes for her difficulties, and discovered little Henry in the servants’ sitting-room, silently and happily packing away his five o’clock tiffin.

  Mild surprise turned into genuine shock when suddenly Mrs Schreiber recognised him from all the photographs she had seen in the newspapers, and cried, ‘Great heavens, it’s the Duke! I mean; the Marquis - I mean the grandson of the French Ambassador. What on earth is he doing here?’

  Even though this catastrophic bolt of lightning had been long awaited by Mrs Butterfield, her reaction to it was what might have been expected: she fell upon her knees with her hands clasped, crying, ‘Oh Lor’, ma’am, don’t send us to jyle! I’m only a poor widow with but a few more years to live.’ And thereafter her sobs and weeping became so loud and uncontrollable that they penetrated into the front of the flat and brought Mr Schreiber hurrying to the scene.

  For the first time, even little Henry lost some of his aplomb at seeing one of his protectresses reduced to a hysterical jelly, and he himself burst into wails of terror.

  It was upon this tableau that Mrs Harris entered as she returned from her little promenade. She stood in the doorway for a moment contemplating the scene. ‘Oh blimey,’ she said, ‘aren’t we for it now.’

  Mr Schreiber was likewise staggered at finding in a state bordering upon hysteria his Cockney cook, plus a young boy whose image not so long ago had decorated the front pages of the metropolitan press as the son of a lord and the grandson of the French Ambassador to the United States.

  Somehow, perhaps because she was the only member of the drama who seemed to be all calm and collected, he had a feeling that Mrs Harris might be at the bottom of this. Actually, at this point, contemplating the scene and aware of all its implications, the little char was doing her best to suppress a giggle. Her eyes were shining with wicked merriment and inner mirth, for she was of the breed that never cries over spilt milk - to the contrary, is more likely to laugh at it if there is a joke to be found. She had always known that eventually they must be caught, and now that it had happened she had no intention of panicking.

  ‘Can you explain this, Mrs Harris?’ Mr Schreiber demanded. ‘You seem to be the only one left here with any wits about her. What the devil is the grandson of the French Ambassador doing here? And what’s got into Mrs Butterfield?’

  ‘That’s just what’s the matter,’ Mrs Harris replied, ‘ ’e ain’t the grandson of the Marquis. That’s what’s got into ’er cooking. Poor thing, ’er nerves ’ave went.’ She then addressed herself to the child and her friend saying, ‘ ’Ere, ’ere, ’Enry, stop yer bawling. Come on, Vi - pull yerself together.’

  Thus admonished, both of them ceased their outcries instantly. Little Henry returned to his victuals, while Mrs Butterfield hauled herself to her feet and mopped her eyes with her apron.

  ‘There now,’ said Mrs Harris, ‘that’s better. Now maybe I’d better explain. This is little ’Enry Brown. He’s a orphan, sort of. We brought ’im over with us from London to help ’im find ’is father.’

  It was now Mr Schreiber’s turn to look bewildered. ‘Oh come on, Mrs Harris, this is the same kid whose picture was in the paper as the grandson of the Marquis.’

  Mrs Schreiber said, ‘I remarked at the time what a nice little boy he seemed to be.’

  ‘That’s because the Marquis took ’im through the Immigrytion for us,’ elucidated Mrs Harris. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have let ’im in. The Marquis had to say something, so ’e used his nut. The Marquis is an old friend of mine - little ’Enry’s been ’avin’ the chicken-pox with him.’

  Mr Schreiber’s already slightly prominent eyes threatened to pop out of his head as he gasped, ‘The Marquis smuggled him through for you? Do you mean to say— ?’

  ‘Maybe I better explyne,’ said Mrs Harris, and forthwith and with no further interruptions she launched into the story of little Henry, the lost GI father, the Gussets, and all that had taken place, including the abortive and unsuccessful visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin. ‘And of course that’s why poor Vi got so nervous ’er cooking went orf. There’s none better than Vi when she’s got nuffink on ’er mind.’

  Mr Schreiber suddenly sat down in a chair and began to roar with laughter until the
tears ran down his cheeks, while Mrs Schreiber went over, put her arms around little Henry and said, ‘You poor dear. How very brave of you. You must have been terrified.’

  In one of his rare moments of loquacity and warmth, and sparked by Mrs Schreiber’s cuddle, little Henry said, ‘Who - me? What of ?’

  Mr Schreiber recovered sufficiently to say, ‘And if that ain’t the damnedest thing I ever heard of ! The French Ambassador stuck with the kid and has to say it’s his grandson. You know you could have got into serious trouble with this, don’t you? And still can if they find out about the kid.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve been lying awake nights thinking about,’ confessed Mrs Harris. ‘It would have been easy as wink if that Mr Brown at Kenosha had been ’is father - a father’s got the right to have ’is own son in ’is own country, ain’t ’e? But he wasn’t.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ asked Mr Schreiber.

  Mrs Harris looked at him gloomily and did not reply, for the simple reason that she did not know.

  ‘Why can’t he stay here with us until Mrs Harris locates his father?’ said Mrs Schreiber, and gave the child another hug, and received one in return - a sudden outburst of spontaneous affection which thrilled her heart. ‘Nobody need know. He’s such a dear little boy.’

  Mrs Butterfield waddled over to Mrs Schreiber, twisting a corner of her apron. ‘Oh ma’am, if you only could,’ she said, ‘I’d cook me ’eart out for yer.’

  Mr Schreiber, whose face had been expressing considerable doubts as to the wisdom of such a course, brightened visibly as at least one solution to what had become a problem dawned, and said to Henry, ‘Come here, sonny.’ The boy arose, went over and stood in front of the seat of Mr Schreiber and looked him straight and unabashedly in the eye.

  ‘How old are you, sonny?’