Chapter 5
"Eleanor! It's Louise." It was the Friday afternoon following the return of the Hadleys from Mexico, and the brown-haired matron had just picked up her phone extension in her bedroom in answer to the first ring. Eleanor glanced at herself in her boudoir mirror and smiled. Marriage was certainly agreeing with her, for she didn't look her thirty-nine years at all. And her fine white skin, tanned not only from Malibu but from the ardent sun of Mexico, seemed more vividly glowing than ever, proof that when a widow finds even at this mature and late stage in life a man capable of satisfying her in bed, she too undergoes a kind of physical renaissance.
"Hi, Louise. How's everything over at your house?"
"That's what I was calling you about, dear," came the voice of the silver-blonde dominatress "Are you still interested in continuing that little project of education impression which you spoke about just before you and Arthur went off to the land of the Aztecs?"
"Decidedly I am, Louise. Hester is getting more difficult every day. I am beginning to see what poor Arthur had to go through all this time, and without any disrespect meant for his first wife, all I can say is that the two of them let themselves be buffaloed by that very consummately precocious young lady."
"I thought you might feel that way, Eleanor," Louise Gilmore laughed softly. "Well, if your stepdaughter happens to be around, and Betty too, you might want to send them over about five o'clock. That is when Janet is going to pay off all the black marks in her ledger. The poor darling accumulated a great many this week, and apparently last week when her score was only fifty, she was in hopes of putting off her reckoning, with the idea that the score would remain the same. You know, I think I told you yesterday, that there was some horseplay with the children and even Hilda participating, which earned Janet an unscheduled dose of the leather sole."
"I know. Betty told me about it. That was the famous tea party at which my new daughter expressed herself so dramatically, wasn't it?"
"The very same," Louise Gilmore laughed again. "I'm afraid she'll really consider me a barbarian when she sees what poor Janet will have to undergo this evening. It's a total of a hundred fifty now, and for the hour preceding our little settling of the score, that naughty young lady is being shut up in the doghouse."
"My gracious!" Eleanor Hadley said interestedly. "Janet must really have been out of line to have earned that!"
The Gilmore "doghouse" was nothing more nor less than an old packing crate about six feet long and two feet deep, one end of which had been cut away to resemble the opening of a canine dwelling. It was kept in the basement of the Gilmore house, and whenever Tony or the two girls had particularly offended their parents, they were invariably sentenced to spend an hour of incarceration for the purpose of meditating over their naughtiness just prior to the painful retribution exacted from their adolescent bottoms. Louise Gilmore, Eleanor Hadley well knew, was more severe than she herself was apt to be with Betty, and went even further along the road of ritualism and ceremonial to drive home the painful but unforgettable lessons she wished her offspring to acquire in an indelible way.
"I'm afraid she was, Eleanor," was the answer. "You know, I allow her about ten days to wipe out the black marks in the book, and today was the last day. But on Monday, the impertinent minx argued with me over what subjects she was going to take her first semester of college-by the way, you and I must both have a little conversation on curricula where both Hester and Janet are concerned."
"Whenever you like, Louise. But do go on."
"Yes, of course. Well, as I was saying, she was most impertinent and I told her to go put down another twenty-five. What did she do but stamp her foot and say that I was being unfair, that she was grown-up now, old enough to go to college, and she thought I ought to reconsider the subject of spankings where she was concerned. I simply told her to put down fifty instead of twenty-five, which brought her score up to a hundred. And I told her that for stamping her foot, I was going to think of something extra, unless she made sufficient amends between then and today to warrant leniency."
"And I take it she didn't."
"You're right as always, Eleanor. No, she decidedly didn't. Yesterday evening, after Fred had come home, she tried to go over my head, so to speak, by appealing to him, and gave him quite a lengthy and lawyer-like argument. I must say it was an ill-advised attempt on her part. Fred told her that she'd just been itching for a good sound spanking and he was leaving the decision up to me. As for her being too old for it, he let her know then and there that until she got married and left our house, she was going to be spanked whenever she deserved it, no matter if she was twenty-one or more."
"That must have floored poor Janet," Eleanor said sympathetically.
"It's her own fault, Eleanor. She just will not learn. You see, it upsets her so much to think of being humiliated and have her younger sister and brother find out about her being spanked like a child, and yet the paradox is that she apparently goes out of her way to invite the very treatment which so upsets her. Maybe it's a quirk in her nature, or just youthful rebellion. But at any rate, I told her that I didn't much appreciate her flouting my decision and that she would only aggravate her case. So then she stamped her foot again and said we were both treating her like a little child and we'd both be sorry some day. Well, Fred blew up at that point. He took her by the ear and smacked her bottom a couple of times with the flat of his hand and told her she could just march back to the ledger and write down another fifty, and that if she didn't submit herself properly today, I was to tell him when he got back from his out-of-town trip this Sunday, and he would personally take a hand and do whatever I had failed to do."
"And so?"
"And so," Louise Gilmore laughed, "Janet is now in the doghouse thinking over her mistakes and I can assure you she is a very chastened young lady. Before I put her in there, she said to me very humbly, 'Mother, I'm very sorry I acted up so, and I'm going to take my punishment from you without any fuss, I promise.' So I told her that I had heard that speech from her several times over the past year and I was going to make very certain that she wasn't going to forget the lesson by inviting some of her best friends over to watch her being spanked. And that, after this long preamble, Eleanor dear, is why I'm calling. I think that if Hester and Betty were to come over by five, Hester would be shocked out of her complacency. And I want her to hear what Janet has to say when the punishment is over, so as to change Miss Hester's opinion about barbarians. You see, in my way I'm just as generous to all my children as you are to Betty and I never deny them anything and I don't let punishment interefere. Long ago Fred and I reasoned it out that instead of withholding something the children wanted and probably justifiably deserved, it was just as well to spank and wipe out the error and the sin rather than deprive them, which has always struck me as being a very negative way of discipline."
"I'm a hundred percent in agreement with you there, Louise. Very well, I'll send Betty and Hester over. And one thing more, Louise-"
"Yes, dear?"
"One of these days I may want to borrow that famous new leather sole of yours. I'll tell you a little more about a plan that's been brewing in my mind the past few days. Maybe when we play bridge together with the Jamisons and the Carruthers. See you then, Louise."