Harriet the Spy

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Little Joe was leaning against the door. He always looked tired when he wasn’t eating. The maid sounded very aggravated. “Haven’t got the change. She went off left me without a cent.”

“Well, when will she be back? I could come back.”

“Lord knows. When she go to Elizabeth Arden she sometimes gone all day. Lot of work to do on her, you know.” The maid giggled nastily.

“Man, she got all that jack and don’t pay. They all alike – more they got, less they pay.” And with that pronouncement Little Joe shuffled off back for his afternoon snack.

Harriet looked unconcerned as he went past. The maid went inside. Harriet leaned against the hydrant and wrote:

I WONDER WHAT THEY DO TO HER ALL DAY. I ONCE SAW MY MOTHER IN A MUD PACK. THEY’LL NEVER GET ME IN A MUD PACK.

She slammed her book and went to the Dei Santis’. The store was terribly busy. Everyone was running to and fro, even Franca who usually had to be propped up somewhere. Little Joe wasn’t even back yet. Well, thought Harriet, this looks like a rotten spy day. She checked Mrs Plumber and the Dei Santis off her list and went on to the Robinsons, the next people on the route.

The Robinsons were a couple who lived in a duplex on Eighty-eighth Street. When they were alone they never said a word to each other. Harriet liked to watch them when they had company, because it made her laugh to see them showing off their house. Because the Robinsons had only one problem. They thought they were perfect.

Luckily their living room was on the ground floor of their duplex. Harriet scurried through the back passageway to the garden and there, by leaning around a box kept for garden tools, she could see in without being seen.

The Robinsons were sitting, as they always were, staring into space. They never worked, and what was worse, they never even read anything. They bought things and brought them home and then they had people in to look at them. Otherwise they didn’t seem to do a blessed thing.

The doorbell rang.

“Ah,” said Mrs Robinson. “There they are now.”

She got up sedately and walked slowly, even though she had obviously been sitting there waiting for the ring. She looked critically as Mr Robinson adjusted his smoking jacket, then went to the door.

“Come in, Jack, Martha, how lovely to see you. It’s been so long. How long will you be in town?”

“Well, we—”

“Look, before you go a step further, look, Martha, at these lovely vinyl squares I just got put in. Aren’t they just perfect?”

“Yes, they are—”

“And that chest in the corner, isn’t that a find?”

“Well, it’s just …”

Mr Robinson stood up. “Hello there, Jack.”

“Hi there, fella. Long time no—”

“Hey, Jack, I wanta show you my gun collection. You haven’t been here since I got two new ones. Just come in here and …” They disappeared from Harriet’s view.

“Martha, come here. You must see the … oh, here, put your coat and purse down in this perfect place, this eighteenth-century luggage rack. Isn’t it divine?”

“Why, yes, it’s—”

“Look, come here, right over here, now isn’t that the most beautiful garden you’ve ever seen?”

“Yes, oooh, aaah, it’s just—”

“You know, Martha, we have the most perfect life …”

“You don’t have any children, do you, Grace?”

“Why, no, but frankly we think that’s just perfect …”

Harriet, having ducked when they looked at the garden, fell over laughing. When she recovered herself she grabbed her notebook.

BOY, OLE GOLLY TOLD ME ONCE THAT SOME PEOPLE THINK THEY’RE PERFECT BUT SHE OUGHTA SEE THESE TWO. IF THEY HAD A BABY IT WOULD LAUGH IN ITS HEAD ALL THE TIME AT THEM SO IT’S A GOOD THING THEY DON’T. ALSO IT MIGHT NOT BE PERFECT. THEN THEY MIGHT KILL IT. I’M GLAD I’M NOT PERFECT – I’D BE BORED TO DEATH. BESIDES IF THEY’RE SO GREAT WHY DO THEY JUST SIT THERE ALL DAY STARING AT NOTHING? THEY COULD BE CRAZY AND NOT EVEN KNOW IT.

She headed over to Harrison Withers’ house. She liked to look at the birdcages he made but, more than that, she intended to be there when he got caught. The Health Department was forever trying to get in to catch him because he had too many cats, but Harrison Withers was very crafty. Whenever his doorbell rang he looked out the window, and if the man ringing the bell wore a hat, he never let him in. All the men in the Health Department wore hats and Harrison Withers didn’t know anybody who wore a hat.

Harriet climbed the steps to the top floor of his rooming house and the last flight that led up to the roof. She could look through one skylight at a place where the paint had been worn away, and she was sure she couldn’t be seen from inside.

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, Dostoyevsky 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 towards her tentatively, as one would towards 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.