Harriet the Spy

by Louise Fitzhugh

  Her parents had called her down from her room while she was busy on a project. Ordinarily the cook served Harriet her dinner at six in the kitchen while her parents had martinis in the living room. Harriet looked at her watch. It was exactly six. So not only had they interrupted her project, but now they were making her late for her dinner, which was very likely getting cold.

  She had been making a time line of her life. By taping sheets of paper carefully together, she had created a strip so long it reached from the door of her bedroom to the bottom of the old toy box that held all her notebooks. It had taken her twelve pieces of paper. Since Harriet would be twelve on her next birthday, she had designated one sheet for each year of her life. Then she had begun to fill in the important events. But she had barely finished half of the first page when her mother interrupted her.

  SIX MONTHS. SPEAKS FIRST WORD, Harriet had just written halfway across the first-year page. She thought for a moment about what her first word might have been. She pictured herself at six months old, with her nursemaid poised over the bassinet looking down at her, probably holding a warm milk-filled bottle. What might she have said?

  FIRST WORD, she wrote as a subcategory. She thought about it for a while, trying to decide what a first word might be, at least a first word from the lips of a highly intelligent New York infant named Harriet M. Welsch. Carefully she printed PROCEED.

  Then she went on to SEVEN MONTHS. SPEAKS FIRST SENTENCE. FIRST SENTENCE: PROCEED WITH THE FEEDING, PLEASE.

  “Harriet, dear?” her mother had called up the stairs to Harriet’s cozy bedroom at the top of the tall, narrow house. “Would you come down, please?”

  Reluctantly Harriet had rolled up her time line and headed down the two long flights of stairs to the double living room on the first floor. “I hope we didn’t interrupt anything important, dear,” Mrs. Welsch said after Harriet entered the living room and sat down on a dark red velvet chair. Harriet shrugged. They would not understand the time line. It would make them feel nervous and uncertain, she thought. Her parents frequently felt nervous and uncertain about her projects.

  So she said only, “I was just thinking about my infancy. Do you happen to remember my first word?”

  “Of course I do! Parents never forget such things,” Mrs. Welsch said. She turned to her husband. “Harry, tell Harriet what her first word was!”

  Harriet’s father stared blankly at her.

  Mrs. Welsch gave a thin laugh. “It was cookie, dear. You were about fourteen months old, and one day you quite clearly said cookie.”

  “And my first sentence?” Harriet asked, glumly realizing that she would have to start her time line over with the correct information. Cross-outs were unacceptable and Harriet only used pens. Just last Christmas her parents had given her a wonderful dark green Waterman pen, which she treasured and used as often as possible. “What was my first sentence?”

  “Well, you combined a verb and a noun, dear. You said, ‘Gimme cookie.’”

  “Oh,” Harriet said. Well, she thought, I won’t bother to erase after all. It’s essentially the same thing as “Proceed with the feeding.”

  “Why did you want me to come down?” she asked her parents.

  “We have some news to share with you. Would you like a peanut, by the way?” Mrs. Welsch put her martini down and passed a small silver dish of peanuts to Harriet.

  Harriet shook her head. Ordinarily she liked peanuts, but for some reason she could feel her appetite disappearing. It made her uncomfortable when her parents announced news. Their news never seemed to be the kind of news Harriet wanted to hear. “What news?” she asked.

  “Your father has received a rather important assignment from the network. Harry, wouldn’t you like to describe it to Harriet?”

  Mr. Welsch had been looking at the folded newspaper on the table near the peanut dish. He was pretending not to. But Harriet could see him surreptitiously glancing at the day’s headlines. “Paris,” he said.

  “Paris?” asked Harriet with suspicion. “France?”

  “We’re to leave next week for Paris!” Mrs. Welsch explained in the same perky, delighted voice that she used to describe bridge tournaments or antiques auctions.

  “For how long?” Harriet wasn’t deceived by the voice. A little vacation in Paris would be okay, she thought. Maybe it would be a pleasant interlude before school resumed next month. But she had an ominous feeling. She was glad she hadn’t accepted a peanut. It might have lulled her too quickly into a cheerful reaction, when really suspicion was called for.

  Her mother wiped her lips tidily, using a small cocktail napkin printed with a red-and-green design of olives in a stack. She said something that sounded like twamah while holding the napkin in front of her mouth.

  “Twamah?” Harriet repeated, wondering if perhaps her mother was speaking French, although Harriet had studied French for two years already, in fifth and sixth grades, and twamah had not been a vocabulary word.

  “Trois mois,” Mr. Welsch said quite clearly and with an air of impatience. “We’re going to live in Paris for three months, beginning next week.”

  “The network has rented a lovely apartment for us, dear,” Mrs. Welsch said. “Quite near the Luxembourg Gardens. Les jardins, I mean.”

  In her mind Harriet leapt ahead on her time line to the final sheet, the one for her twelfth year, the one that she wedged under a corner of her old toy box when the long strip was unrolled on the floor of her room. AGE ALMOST-TWELVE: MOVES TO PARIS. It was not what she had had in mind for age almost-twelve.

  “I won’t go,” she told her parents, glaring. Then she added, “And in case you missed it, I expostulated that.”

  Her father looked at her through his glasses. Harriet’s father was a television executive. He had an executive face, and hair that was combed in an executive way.

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Welsch said.

  Harriet imagined how he must look in his office when some poor scriptwriter, nervous and hungry, sat before him with a manuscript held together by a frayed rubber band and pleaded for a chance to be head writer on a sitcom so he could pay his debts and feed his starving children. Her father would probably look down through his glasses the same way. He would probably say in that same executive voice, “Excuse me?”

  Harriet sighed. She repeated it. “I won’t go,” she said for the second time.

  “No, no, I understood that part,” her father said. He sipped his martini. “I didn’t understand what you added, about expostulating.”

  “Oh. Well,” Harriet explained, “Mr. Grenville says—”

  Harriet’s mother interrupted. “Mr. Grenville is one of Harriet’s teachers at school, dear,” she told Harriet’s father.

  He nodded. Harriet could tell he was making a note of that in his head. “Go on,” he said.

  “Mr. Grenville says we must use strong verbs when we write.”

  “Strong verbs?” Mr. Welsch took another sip of his drink.

  “Yes. For example, instead of just saying ‘He walked,’ we should say ‘He ambled.’ Or ‘He strolled.’”

  “I see.”

  “And instead of ‘She said,’ it would be better to use a strong verb.”

  “Like expostulate, perhaps?” Harriet’s father asked.

  “Exactly. Expostulate is my current favorite. I have a list of favorite strong verbs in my notebook.”

  “And so when you told us that you wouldn’t go, you wanted to be certain that we understood you weren’t simply saying it. You were—”

  “Expostulating,” Harriet said.

  “I see.”

  “She’s very clever, dear, isn’t she?” Mrs. Welsch said to her husband. She looked proudly at Harriet, who was sitting stiffly on the dark red velvet chair still glaring at both of her parents. Then she held the small dish of peanuts toward Harriet again, but Harriet once more declined. She was hoping that her failure to take a peanut—combined with the expostulating—would indicate to them how outraged she was.

>   “It is outrageous,” she said. “The whole idea is outrageous.” Harriet liked the sound of that. Probably, she decided, she would add outrageous to the list of strong adjectives she was also keeping in her notebook. “And I absolutely will not go.”

  “Harriet,” said her father, and now he finished the last drops of his martini, set the glass down, and reached for the newspaper, “we were not planning to take you.”

  As she had feared, her dinner was cold. Cook had not even had the courtesy to keep it warm in the oven for her. Harriet sat down at the round wooden table in the kitchen, unfolded her napkin, and frowned at her plate. Chicken. Chicken was okay cold. Salad. That was supposed to be cold, so Harriet couldn’t complain about the salad, though she turned the lettuce leaves over carefully with her fork to make certain there were no lurking onions. Cook knew that Harriet loathed raw onions but sometimes she sneaked them in anyway. Not tonight. No onions, Harriet noted with relief.

  But there were mashed potatoes on the plate. Few things in the world were worse than cold mashed potatoes. They tainted the other food, Harriet decided after a moment. So she stood up, carried her plate to the sink, and noisily scraped the potatoes into the garbage. Cook watched her.

  “Wouldn’t be cold if you’d come on time,” Cook said pointedly.

  Harriet sat back down at the table and stabbed a bit of chicken with her fork. She vaguely wanted to say something disagreeable and sharp-tongued to Cook. It was their usual mode of communication, although they were surprisingly fond of each other. But no words came to her. She poked at the chicken again and realized to her horror that she was starting to cry.

  Crying! And she would be twelve years old in October!

  Cook hadn’t noticed yet. “You’re pretty quiet tonight for someone whose mouth usually goes yammer yammer yammer,” she said, leaning over the stove to stir whatever she was preparing for Harriet’s parents’ dinner.

  Harriet gave an enormous sniff and tried very hard to make it sound like a sarcastic one, but it didn’t. It was quite wet, actually more a snuffle than a sniff, and she had to grab her napkin and hold it to her face.

  “I got a bad feeling,” Cook said, “it’s not mashed potatoes making you that miserable.”

  “No,” Harriet wailed. “They’re going to Paris and they’re not taking me!” Even as she wailed it, Harriet remembered that she didn’t want to live in Paris. She wanted to live right here in New York, in this tall, skinny house on East Eighty-seventh Street where she had lived all her life, nearly twelve years so far.

  “Oh, that,” said Cook.

  Harriet finished one final sniff, wiped her nose on her napkin, and looked at Cook suspiciously, “What do you mean ‘Oh, that’? Did you know already?”

  Cook nodded, “Yeah, they’re paying me to stay on and cook. Wanted to pay me less because there won’t be so much cooking with them gone. But then they found out that those people across the street…” She gestured toward the small window that looked out onto the sidewalk. Because the kitchen was in the basement, Harriet and Cook could watch people’s feet through the window, and they often did. Feet were interesting, Harriet thought. She had been thinking about adding foot and shoe observations to her notes on her spy route.

  Now Harriet looked through the window because Cook was pointing in that direction. She saw a pair of high-heeled brown leather boots walk past, followed by a small fuzzy dog on a leash. Suddenly the dog stopped, sniffed the small wrought-iron fence that enclosed the kitchen window, and raised his leg alongside it. Harriet looked away to give the dog the privacy she felt he deserved.

  Cook wasn’t referring to the passing pedestrians, anyway. She meant, Harriet knew, the people who lived directly across the street in a brownstone house almost identical to the Welsches’. Their name was Feigenbaum. Dr. Feigenbaum was a psychiatrist and had an office on the first floor of their house. His wife, who had an office upstairs, was a doctor who specialized in women, which Harriet thought was a very limited specialty; Harriet preferred unisex everything, especially clothes. Somewhere in the midst of all those offices the two Dr. Feigenbaums also lived. Harriet, who had been a spy since she was eight, had been spying on the Feigenbaums for several years. She felt that they had some deeply hidden secrets and a life lacking in emotional depth.

  They also were lacking in competent domestic help, Harriet knew, and frequently tried to hire Cook away from the Welsches.

  “They tried again?” Harriet asked.

  “Yeah, offered me full time, full pay. Seemed like a good time to make the move, with your parents away and all. You going to eat that or not?” Cook began to pick up Harriet’s plate. Harriet looked at her uneaten chicken, suddenly decided she was hungry after all, and snatched the plate back. “I’m eating it,” she said. “Don’t get grabby.”

  Cook pulled out one of the other chairs that matched the pine table and sat down. Harriet could tell Cook wanted a cigarette. Harriet knew that sometimes she went out into the back courtyard and smoked.

  “I might consider letting you smoke in the kitchen when they’re gone,” Harriet said slyly. “The Feigenbaums never would. They’d give you pamphlets about lung cancer.” She stacked three cucumber slices on top of one another and speared them with her fork.

  Cook sighed. “I already said I was staying. Your parents talked me into it. They’re paying me my full salary. We’re still arguing about weekends, though.”

  Weekends. Hearing the word gave Harriet an odd sensation in her stomach. Cook always left on Friday night after dinner and usually didn’t return until Sunday night. Harriet ordinarily spent her weekends spying, reading, and spending time with her best friends, Simon Rocque, aka Sport, and Janie Gibbs, who both lived nearby. She supposed she would still do that. But if Cook left on Friday night, the house would be empty. Harriet didn’t really like the idea of coming home to an empty house. Of sleeping in an empty house.

  “I’m not sure it’s legal, actually, to leave an eleven-year-old alone for a whole weekend,” Harriet said. “For three months of weekends. Twamah of weekends. Of course, I’m quite competent. More competent than the usual eleven-year-old. But the Department of Child Welfare may look on it somewhat differently, and I suspect—”

  “Yammer yammer yammer,” said Cook, and she got up and went to the stove to stir things again.

  “And I hope you don’t think I’m going with you to Brooklyn on weekends,” Harriet went on. “I like your house just fine, Cook, and I like your sister, and I enjoy going to your church. But I do not like your son one bit. He’s very sarcastic, and I think he has a personality disorder. And anyway, I have things to do on weekends. I’m behind in my spying.”

  “Yammer,” Cook said. “What makes you think I want you in my house in Brooklyn every weekend? I have things to do, too, and they don’t include you, Harriet Welsch.”

  Harriet picked up her empty plate and took it to the sink. “So you’ll just go off and leave me here alone?” she asked. “I’m nonplussed by that.” Nonplussed, Harriet said again to herself, liking the sound of it, and deciding to try to use it more often.

  “Who said you’ll be alone?”

  “But if you go to Brooklyn—”

  “You mean they didn’t tell you?”

  “Tell me what?” Harriet remembered suddenly that she had stomped out of the living room while her parents were still talking about the plans they had made. Maybe she should have stayed and listened.

  “Miss Golly’s coming back.” Cook rinsed Harriet’s plate and loaded it into the dishwasher. “That uppity old thing.” She began to gather silverware to set the table for Harriet’s parents’ dinner.

  “Ole Golly? She’s coming back?”

  “Didn’t I just say that? You deaf?”

  Harriet threw her arms around the cook. “Oh!” she cried. “Cooky, Cooky, Cooky, I love you so much! No wonder you were my very first word! No wonder I said ‘Gimme cookie’!” In exhilaration she kissed Cook on her astonished mouth.

&nbs
p; Upstairs, the clock in the front hall bonged suddenly. Seven bongs. With a scowl Cook pried Harriet loose and lifted her apron to wipe the kiss away. “Quit that nonsense,” she said. “Now go tell your parents that their dinner will be on the table in five minutes, and that the reason it’s late is because you wouldn’t eat and you blubbered and yammered, so they better not blame me.” Briskly she carried place mats and silver to the table in the adjoining dining room.

  Harriet sped up the stairs. Ole Golly’s coming back! Ole Golly’s coming back! she sang to herself as she emerged on the first floor. The living room was empty. “I’m nonplussed!” she sang aloud as she sped up the next flight and started on the third, toward her bedroom. “Nonplussed!”

  Then she remembered her parents and turned back. They were in the library on the second floor. Her father was still reading the newspaper he had begun in the living room, and her mother was laying out a game of solitaire on the small mahogany table between the front windows.

  “Your dinner is just about to be served!” Harriet sang in a soprano voice, pretending to be a singer on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera. Then she curtseyed and blew kisses to her parents, who were both staring at her in a nonplussed way, and continued up the final flight of stairs to her room, where she flung herself onto her bed and lay smiling at the ceiling, overwhelmed with happiness.

  Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York

  Copyright © 1964 by Louise Fitzhugh, copyright renewed © 1992 by Lois Anne Morehead Excerpt from Harriet Spies Again copyright © 2002 by Lois Anne Morehead

  The lyrics on page 80 are taken from the song “Yes, Sir, That’s My Baby” by Gus Kahn and Walter Donaldson. Copyright © 1925 by Bourne, Inc., New York, NY. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press.