Harriet the Spy

by Louise Fitzhugh

  She peered down. As she did, she remembered that she had planned to watch him in the supermarket to see if he lived on kidneys like the cats.

  The cats were all milling around. She went to the other skylight. Sunlight flooded the other room but here caught glints from tools, from the tiny shining minarets which topped the cages. Harriet liked to look at this room. The cages were beautiful soaring things, and when he was in this room, Harrison Withers was a happy man.

  Harriet liked to watch him work, admired the patience which allowed him to sit bent over for hours twisting minuscule wires around ridiculously small connections.

  Oh, what luck! Harrison Withers was just coming through the door with a big shopping bag. Now she could see what he ate. The cats all followed him into the kitchen as he started taking things out of the bag. They started mewing and rubbing against his legs as he took kidney after kidney out of the bag.

  “There now, children,” he spoke to them gently. He always spoke very softly. “There now. We’re all going to eat now. Hello, everybody—yes, yes, hello. Hello, David, hello, Rasputin, yes, Goethe, Alex, Sandra, Thomas Wolfe, Pat, Puck, Faulkner, Cassandra, Gloria, Circe, Koufax, Marijane, Willy Mays, Francis, Kokoschka, Donna, Fred, Swann, Mickey Mantle, Sebastian, Yvonne, Jerusalem, Dostoievsky, and Barnaby. Hello, hello, hello.”

  Harriet had counted this time. There were twenty-six. Then that meant that the twenty-six plates were for the cats. What did he eat from? She watched as he pulled from the very bottom of the bag one small container of yogurt. Cats don’t eat yogurt, thought Harriet; that must be what he eats.

  She watched while he fed the cats then spooned a bit of yogurt into his mouth. He went into his workroom, carrying the container, and closed the door behind him because the cats were not allowed in that room. He sat at his work table before a particularly beautiful cage, a replica of a Victorian summer house.

  Quiet descended upon the room as he sat studying the cage. His hand moved as in a dream to put the yogurt to one side. He looked lovingly, his eyes slightly glazed, at the one small unfinished portion of the structure. Very slowly he moved one piece a quarter of an inch to the left. He sat back and looked at it a long time. Then he moved it back.

  Harriet wrote in her notebook:

  HE LOVES TO DO THAT. IS THIS WHAT OLE GOLLY MEANS? SHE SAYS PEOPLE WHO LOVE THEIR WORK LOVE LIFE. DO SOME PEOPLE HATE LIFE? ANYWAY I WOULDN’T MIND LIVING LIKE HARRISON WITHERS BECAUSE HE LOOKS HAPPY EXCEPT I WOULDN’T LIKE ALL THOSE CATS. I MIGHT EVEN LIKE A DOG.

  She took one last look at Harrison Withers, who was gently winding a piece of wire around two little curling pieces of wood. She got up then and went down to the street. In front of the house she stopped to write:

  THERE IS ALSO THAT YOGURT. THINK OF EATING THAT ALL THE TIME. THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A GOOD TOMATO SANDWICH NOW AND THEN.

  She decided to go see Janie awhile before going on to the rest of her route. Janie lived in the garden duplex of a renovated brownstone off East End Avenue on Eighty-fourth Street. Harriet rang the outside bell and pushed the door when it buzzed back. Janie was standing inside at her doorway and she was in a foul mood. Harriet could tell just by looking at her. Janie always looked terribly cheerful when she was in her most angry mood. Harriet figured it had to be that way because Janie’s normal face was one of sheer rage. Today she smiled happily and sang out winningly, “Hello, there, Harriet Welsch.” Things couldn’t be worse.

  Harriet walked toward her tentatively, as one would toward a mad dog, trying to see Janie’s eyes more clearly, but Janie whipped inside the door. Harriet followed her in.

  “What’s the matter?” Harriet whispered. They were standing in the little foyer off the living room.

  “They’re after me,” whispered Janie, still smiling wildly.

  “Who?”

  “The Rat Pack.” This was what Janie called her mother, her father, her brother, and her grandmother who lived with them.

  “Why?”

  “My mother says I’m going to blow us all up and that I have to go to dancing school. Come past here, then they won’t see us.” Janie was hissing through her outrageous smile as she led them up the back steps to what she called her lab but which was really her room.

  One corner of her room had been stripped bare. The rug had been pulled back, exposing one corner where Janie had started to cut off the excess to get it out of the way, but which she had been stopped from doing by her mother in an hysterical fit. At that time there had been a large fight through which Janie grinned broadly, and her mother let her know that it didn’t make a whit of difference if they didn’t ordinarily have rugs in labs (“They catch fire,” Janie had said, which had set her mother off again), that Janie had a rug in her room that was going to stay there, and that the very best she could hope for was to have it rolled back. So it lay there in a roll at the end of the room.

  The lab itself was very complex and frightened Harriet whenever she looked at it, although she never would have admitted this to Janie. It consisted of rows and rows of shelves filled with bottles, all filled with suspicious fluids and looking as though you would turn into Mr. Hyde if you drank them. Only Janie understood anything whatever about them, and she wouldn’t explain but instead called everyone a cretin who asked her. The maids wouldn’t go near Janie’s room, so years ago she had had to learn to clean it herself.

  Harriet stood staring at all the equipment while Janie rushed over to something boiling furiously on a Bunsen burner. She fiddled with it and turned it lower, then turned back to Harriet. “This time I may really get it,” she said thoughtfully and went over and flopped on her bed.

  “You mean…”

  “Yes. They may take it all away.”

  “Oh, they couldn’t.”

  “There have been people before me who have been misunderstood. They could.” And the way Janie said this, with her smile dropped and her eyes boring into Harriet’s, made shivers run up Harriet’s back.

  “What would you do?”

  “Leave. Of course.” One thing about Janie, thought Harriet, she never has a moment’s hesitation about anything.

  “What is this about dancing school?”

  “Just wait, buddy. They’re going to get you too. I heard my mother talking to your mother. Who ever heard of Pasteur going to dancing school? Or Madame Curie or Einstein?” Janie spit out the names.

  Harriet couldn’t think of any spies who went to dancing school either. This was a bad development. “Whether they know it or not, I’m not going,” Harriet said firmly.

  “They will never get me,” Janie said very loudly. Then in a different tone, “Hey, Harriet, I’ve got to finish this experiment.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve got some things to put in my notebook. Go ahead.” Janie got up briskly and went over to her lab table. “If I don’t do it now, this thing will curdle.”

  “What are you making?”

  There was no answer. There was never any answer when you asked Janie this, but Harriet did it every now and then just to be polite. It was something explosive. That much was perfectly clear. Harriet sat looking around her for a while, at Janie’s back bent attentively over her work, at the sunlight coming in the window—the late afternoon sun which looked sad and pleasant at the same time and which reminded her abruptly of New Year’s Day last year. There hadn’t been anything important about that day. She had just happened to look at the sun in the same way. She leaned back on the bed. It would be nice to be here or somewhere like this every day.

  MAYBE WHEN I GROW UP I CAN HAVE AN OFFICE. ON THE DOOR IT CAN SAY “HARRIET THE SPY” IN GOLD LETTERS. AND THEN IT CAN HAVE OFFICE HOURS LIKE THE DENTIST’S DOOR HAS AND UNDERNEATH IT CAN SAY ANY SPY WORK UNDERTAKEN. I GUESS I WON’T PUT THE PRICE ON THE DOOR. THEN THEY’LL HAVE TO COME IN AND ASK ME. I CAN GO THERE EVERY DAY FROM ELEVEN TO FOUR AND WRITE IN MY NOTEBOOK. PEOPLE WILL COME IN AND TELL ME WHO TO GO AND SPY ON AND I CAN DO THAT OUTSIDE OF OFFICE HOURS. I WONDER IF I WILL GET ANY MURDER CASES. I WOULD HAVE T
O HAVE A GUN AND FOLLOW PEOPLE BUT I BET IT WOULD BE AT NIGHT AND I WOULDN’T BE ALLOWED OUT.

  “Hey, Janie, if you were going to slit somebody’s throat, wouldn’t you do it in the dead of night?”

  “I’d poison them.” Janie didn’t even turn around.

  I bet you would, thought Harriet. “But, Janie, they’d just trace the poison.”

  “Not the one I’ve got.”

  “Did you make a new one?”

  “Yes.”

  Harriet went back to her notebook.

  WELL, MAYBE THERE’S SOMETHING TO THIS CHEMISTRY AFTER ALL. I COULD POISON PINKY AND NO ONE WOULD EVER KNOW IT. I BET THEY NEED SOME NEW POISONS. BUT OLE GOLLY SAYS THAT IN WASHINGTON THEY’VE ALREADY GOT A LITTLE TUBE WITH A SPOONFUL OF SOMETHING THAT WILL BLOW UP THE WHOLE WORLD, MAYBE THE WHOLE UNIVERSE. WHAT WOULD HAPPEN? WOULD WE FLY THROUGH THE AIR? IN SPACE YOU JUST FLOAT AROUND. I WOULD BE LONELY.

  “Oh, boy, is that maddening,” Janie stormed away from the lab table and sat down with her arms folded.

  “What happened?” Harriet looked up.

  “I goofed,” Janie said. “If I’d done it right, it would have made a terrific noise.”

  “What would your mother have done?”

  “That’s who the noise was for, silly. If they think I’ll set foot in a dancing school, they’re off their rockers.”

  “Why don’t you blow up the dancing school?” Harriet asked sensibly.

  “Oh, they’d just find another place to have it. I know this kind of thing. Once they get this kind of thing in their heads, forget it. The only way out is to absolutely refuse. My mother hates to spend money, that’s one thing; so if she can make a joke out of my not wanting to, then I’m in the clear because then she can save the money.”

  Harriet knew what she meant. Mrs. Gibbs tried to make a bad joke out of everything. Mrs. Welsch always spoke of Janie’s mother as “that smart nose, Mabel Gibbs.” Harriet thought to herself that one thing she couldn’t stand was the kind of person who thought she was funny when she wasn’t.

  “See, if she can get across to her friends the idea that I’m an impossible eccentric, then it won’t be her fault I’m not in dancing school,” Janie went on. “And as for me, I couldn’t care less if I learn to dance. I’ve got a big picture of Newton learning the Charleston.”

  Janie had a definite mind. That was one thing you could say for her. Harriet admired it.

  There was a knock on the door. “Oh, brother,” Janie said and got up to answer it.

  It was Janie’s mother. She gave her big horse laugh as she came into the room. “Well, well, how’s Dr. Caligari?” she boomed out and laughed again raucously.

  It’s a good thing she laughs, thought Harriet, because no one else ever does. Janie looked at her mother stony-faced. Harriet did the same.

  “That’s my kid, a bundle of fun,” and so saying Mrs. Gibbs slapped Janie on the back with such a wallop that Janie almost fell to the floor. Recovering herself, she glared again, a hideous smile beginning to creep across her face.

  “‘Yes, sir, that’s my baby, No, sir, don’t mean maybe,”’ Mrs. Gibbs began to sing in her rollicking way while Harriet and Janie looked at the floor in a state of acute embarrassment. Noticing finally that she had no audience, Mrs. Gibbs stopped. “Well, Harriet,” she hollered, “haven’t seen you in a long time. Have a nice summer?” Mrs. Gibbs never waited for an answer from children, thinking they were too shy to speak (which they always were around her), but zoomed on with her shouts. “Talked to your mother the other day. Has Janie told you about dancing school? Your mother’s all for it and I am too. You girls need a few graces, you know, turning into young women any day now, don’t want to be clumps on the dance floor, nothing more embarrassing than a wallflower. Your mother’s worried about the way you move, Harriet.” And she suddenly focused on Harriet, waking her out of a reverie.

  “Fast,” Harriet said, “that’s the way I move, fast. What’s wrong with that?”

  Mrs. Gibbs stared at her. Janie went back to her lab table. Mrs. Gibbs, not having any idea how to take Harriet’s comment, decided, as she always did, that the best thing was to laugh it off. She gave an enormous whoop of laughter. Harriet saw Janie’s shoulders go up in a quick little embarrassed cringe.

  “Well, now, aren’t you something. Wait’ll I tell Harry that. You’re as bad as Janie.” She laughed a lot more for good measure. “Well, we’ll just see about that. I think you girls have something to learn. I think you have to find out you’re girls. I think we might just get together, all us mothers, and blast a little sense into your heads”—her hand was on the doorknob—“and I don’t mean your kind of blast, Dr. Jekyll.” She started to open the door and at that moment there was a terrific noise. Something on the lab table flew straight up into the air, and Mrs. Gibbs went through the door like a shot.

  Janie turned around and they both looked at the door through which came several different screams and feet clattering as Mrs. Gibbs tore down the steps, screeching, “Harry Gibbs, she’s done it. Harry, come here, Harry, that maniac will kill us all, Harry Gibbs, come here, she’s blown up the house!”

  They listened to a whispered colloquy in the downstairs hall after Harry had run out, saying, “WHAT! WHAT? What’s happened?”

  After the whispers there was an ominous silence during which they must have realized that the house was still standing. Then Harry’s voice—“I’ll go speak to her”—and his feet beginning the climb.

  Harriet had no desire to watch Mr. Gibbs’s tiny perspiring face as he tried to cope with his daughter. It would only make it worse for him if she was there.

  “I think I’ll just go down the back steps,” she said gently, going toward the door.

  “I guess you better.” Janie sounded tired.

  “Don’t give up,” Harriet whispered as she left.

  “Never,” Janie whispered back.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  That night at dinner everything was going along as usual, that is, Mr. and Mrs. Welsch were having an interminable, rambling conversation about nothing in particular while Harriet watched it all like a tennis match, when suddenly Harriet leaped to her feet as though she had just then remembered, and screamed, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go to dancing school.”

  “Harriet!” Mrs. Welsch was appalled. “How dare you use words like that at the table.”

  “Or any other place, dear,” interjected Mr. Welsch calmly.

  “All right, I’ll be FINKED if I’ll go to dancing school.” Harriet stood and screamed this solidly. She was throwing a fit. She only threw fits as a last resort, so that even as she did it she had a tiny feeling in the back of her brain that she had already lost. She wouldn’t, however, have it said that she went down without a try.

  “Where in the world did you learn a word like that?” Mrs. Welsch’s eyebrows were raised almost to her hairline.

  “It’s not a verb, anyway,” said Mr. Welsch. They both sat looking at Harriet as though she were a curiosity put on television to entertain them.

  “I will not, I will not, I will not,” shouted Harriet at the top of her lungs. She wasn’t getting the right reaction. Something was wrong.

  “Oh, but you will,” said Mrs. Welsch calmly. “It really isn’t so bad. You don’t even know what it’s like.”

  “I hated it,” said Mr. Welsch and went back to his dinner.

  “I do so know what’s it’s like.” Harriet was getting tired of standing up and screaming. She wished she could sit down but it wouldn’t have done. It would have looked like giving up. “I went there once on a visit with Beth Ellen because she had to go and I was spending the night, and you have to wear party dresses and all the boys are too short and you feel like a hippopotamus.” She said this all in one breath and screamed “hippopotamus.”

  Mr. Welsch laughed. “An accurate description, you must admit.”

  “Darling, the boys get taller as you go along.”

  “I just won’t.�
� Somehow, indefinably, Harriet felt she was losing ground all the time.

  “It isn’t so bad.” Mrs. Welsch went back to her dinner.

  This was too much. The point wasn’t coming across at all. They had to be roused out of their complacency. Harriet took a deep breath, and in as loud a voice as she could, repeated, “I’ll be damned if I’ll go!”

  “All right, that does it.” Mrs. Welsch stood up. She was furious. “You’re getting your mouth washed out with soap, young lady. Miss Golly, Miss Golly, step in here a minute.” When there was no response, Mrs. Welsch rang the little silver dinner bell and in a moment Cook appeared.

  Harriet stood petrified. Soap!

  “Cook, will you tell Miss Golly to step in here a minute.” Mrs. Welsch stood looking at Harriet as though she were a worm, as Cook departed. “Now Harriet, to your room. Miss Golly will be up shortly.”

  “But…”

  “Your room,” said Mrs. Welsch firmly, pointing to the door.

  Feeling rather like an idiot, Harriet left the dining room. She thought for half a second about waiting around and listening outside but decided it was too risky.

  She went up to her room and waited. Ole Golly came in a few minutes later.

  “Well, now, what is this about dancing school?” she asked amiably.

  “I’m not going,” Harriet said meekly. There was something that made her feel ridiculous when she shouted at Ole Golly. Maybe because she never got the feeling with Ole Golly that she did with her parents that they never heard anything.

  “Why not?” Ole Golly asked sensibly.

  Harriet thought a minute. The other reasons weren’t really it. It was that the thought of being in dancing school somehow made her feel undignified. Finally she had it. “Spies don’t go to dancing school,” she said triumphantly.

  “Oh, but they do,” said Ole Golly.

  “They do not,” said Harriet rudely.

  “Harriet”—Ole Golly took a deep breath and sat down—“have you ever thought about how spies are trained?”