Chapter 8
By the last week of August, Arthur Hadley had made a swift and most efficient hiatus in moving to Claremont, opening his office in that pleasant little town's very modern mall, and arranging for Hester's entrance as a freshman into Claremont College for Girls. He had had some misgivings about moving his housekeeper along with him, but by fortunate circumstance she had just come to the point of giving him her notice because she had had an invitation to go live with her younger sister in Tacoma. Arthur Hadley had given her a month's wages and a glowing reference in the event that she decided to go back to work, and thanked her for all she had done for him and Hester. But on this last subject, she shook her head and tactfully replied, "Well, Mr. Hadley, sir, to tell the truth, I haven't felt that I've done very much with that young lady, begging your pardon. If you ask me, the best thing in the world you could have done was to get married so she'll have a mother who sets her straight. That girl needs a good talking too, and maybe something else, I'll be bound."
It was just as well for her piece of mind that Hester didn't hear this farewell conversation, for she had no inkling whatsoever that the days of the virginity of her bottom so far as chastisement was concerned were finitely numbered.
Hester was given a very spacious room across the hall from Betty's, which was actually bigger than her own room back in Pomona, but it didn't seem to please her. Busy with his preparations for making a success of his new venture on his own and adjusting himself to the placid routine of getting to know his new neighbors and at the same time, at night, enjoying Eleanor's passionate devotion, Arthur Hadley attributed Hester's diffidence to the understandable nostalgia which she would have for her past surroundings. At the same time, it was his fervent hope that, exposed as she would be to Betty's cheerful aura, his problematic daughter would be compelled to become more of an extrovert than in the past.
He and Eleanor had agreed that Betty would call him "Uncle Arthur" for a time until of her own accord the lovely golden-haired teenager preferred to give him the title of "Father," and Betty certainly showed no signs at all of any indifference to him. By contrast, indeed, her politeness and natural sweetness and exuberance delighted him, and with each new day he was more and more convinced that a kindly fate had taken pity on a lonely widower by introducing him to Eleanor Stanfield and her delightful daughter.
Eleanor, meanwhile, explained to him the status of the neighborhood children with whom Betty was on the friendliest terms and something about their parents. He had already heard about the Gilmores and their three offspring, Janet, Tony and Constance, and their buxom, very attractive, German maid, Hilda. Mabel Carruthers was an attractive auburn-haired woman in her early forties, svelte and quite personable, and her husband, Dave was forty-seven, a successful attorney who specialized in patent law. They had two daughters, brown-haired Verna, rather tomboyish, fourteen and a half years of age, and black-haired Barbara, not quite seventeen, bewitchingly attractive and beginning to discover the fascination of the opposite sex.
"They're both delightful girls, Arthur dear," Eleanor explained on their second evening back home as the two of them lay in bed, cuddling and kissing. Eleanor wore the black nylon nightie which he had bought for her in Mexico, and her voluptuous, ripe body had never been more alluring, with the gauzy black sheath accentuating the milkiness of her most intimate anatomy where the sun hadn't caressingly bronzed it. "Just like Louise, Mabel deals out the discipline at the Carruthers' house, though occasionally Dave will take a hand when the girls are especially naughty. Mabel doesn't like Barbara to have dates except on Friday nights, and she has to be back at ten-thirty. She stated that in June when Barbara did very well in her next to last term in high school. As for Verna, she's always getting into mischief but she's very goodhearted and generous and fair with her companions. I like her almost as much as Constance, though she perhaps is a little more nerve-wracking to have around. Just like Constance, she takes her punishments very stoically and the next moment they're forgotten. Barbara is beginning to feel that she's a little too old for spanking, but Mabel and Dave know how to bring her up to the mark when she gets adult notions about independence and that sort of thing, just like Janet Gilmore."
"You mentioned, darling, that Louise Gilmore keeps a demerit book."
"That's true. She lets the demerits accumulate over a week, but they must be cleared off within ten days, like it or not. That's because she's quite busy in social and charitable affairs in the community and doesn't always have time to deal with the offender at the moment. So she'll say, 'Janet, go put yourself down for fifteen spanks in the book,' and then by the tenth day, Janet must bring her the book for a reckoning. And since Janet is eighteen and will be starting Claremont College along with your daughter Hester, darling, she's beginning to get very unhappy about the humiliation of being spanked just like a little girl. So there are times when she lets the demerits pile up in the hope that perhaps Louise will remit them, which of course Louise won't ever do. So on occasion the poor darling has a rather lengthy and painful ordeal in store for her. As I've told her before, because sometimes she's let it slip to me that she's not entirely happy with not being treated like an adult--the best way to avoid that is not to earn demerits."
"It would seem to me that these two families have the problem of discipline pretty fairly worked out," Arthur Hadley mused.
"Yes, they do. And of course my dear friend Frieda Jamison and her husband Hank, though a very easygoing couple, have laid down the law to their two girls and even their twelve-year old son Bob. Frieda is about my age, rather tall and athletic, a decided brunette and Hank is your age, Arthur, and he's a commercial artist with his own studio here in Claremont. He's done a lot of work for children's magazines. Besides Bob, they've got Nancy, who is fourteen, and a real redhead who's going to be a real beauty someday soon, and Sally, who is seventeen, sandy-haired and quite maturely developed for her age. She too is beginning to feel her oats so far as boys are concerned, and Frieda and Hank have made it plain to her that she's to go out only with fellows she brings home to be introduced to them and then only on Friday or Saturday nights when there isn't any other family affair planned, and of course they have a curfew for her too just like all us parents. Both Frieda and Hank handle the spanking problems at the Jamison house. So you can see, lover, that when Betty starts introducing Hester to all her friends, your daughter is going to discover that nobody at all--except maybe Sally and Barbara and of course Janet--thinks that there's anything unusual about getting a spanking when they're naughty. The psychological effect should, if you'll pardon the pun, soften Hester up for the time when she faces the reality of crime and punishment. But understand me, darling, I am absolutely not going to undertake chastising her until you yourself give me the go-ahead sign. As I've already said, I think it would be a drastic mistake so very soon to let her think that she's hardly changed homes and acquired a new stepmother and stepsister and feel herself in a reformatory where punishments are meted out."
"I quite agree with you, Eleanor. But I want her to be treated just as fairly as you would your own daughter. If she does something wrong that offends you, I expect her to be old enough to understand her responsibilities in the matter and not to have immunity just because she happens to be my girl and not yours."
"Well, darling," Eleanor murmured as she slyly slid her hand along his thighs and grasped the tip of his stiffening cock, "That works both ways. The time is going to come when you will be vexed with my girl and want to take her across your lap for a sound walloping, so that's why I'm letting Betty know that she too can't exactly expect total immunity from you in the future."
"How grim you make it all sound," he chuckled thickly, for by now the caressing of her soft fingers had made him furiously randy. His lips nuzzled one of her nipples, and his right hand was on one of her spacious bottomcheeks while his left arm was passed under her armpit as they lay facing each other on their sides.
"But it isn't grim at all, darling. I can assure you that Betty doesn't have the slightest resentment for me. An hour or so after her spanking, she's just as cheerful as ever, and I think she loves me more. That's because everything is done out in the open, and she has acquired enough intelligence to see that I don't punish without a reason. A parent should never punish in anger at any time. Oh yes, I'll admit that some educators would argue with me about what would seem to be ritualism in the way I punish, just as they would with Louise Gilmore and her demerit book, but basically Louise and I both agree that teenagers are an impressionable lot and that it's quite one thing to turn a girl over her lap and give her a few hasty angry spanks and another to make her go to her room and meditate about her follies with the knowledge that in an hour or two her mother is going to enter her room and give her a sermon and then punish her according to her just desserts. And now, young man, I'm beginning to wonder about you. Everytime I talk about spanking, you get so stiff I can hardly hold you," she softly teased as she sinuously drew up her filmy nightie and, guiding his throbbing cock to the furry nest of her pussy, pressed it in between the twitching, moist lips of her ardent vulva. With a groan, Arthur Hadley closed his eyes and kissed her hard on the mouth, his left hand moving to grasp her right tittie, his right hand squeezing the jouncy, satiny naked globe of one luscious bare buttock. Slowly and deliberately, he began to fuck her, until soon he had reached her threshold of amorous sensitivity and she began to whimper and gasp and cling to him more tightly, furling her tongue between his lips and exhorting him to greater passion...
After their rapturous lovemaking had been concluded and they lay side by side with fingers entwined, sharing a cigarette between them, Arthur Hadley pursued the topic which had now become of such sensually rousing interest to him: "You've told me how you spank Betty, darling, and I was wondering how the other parents chastise their children when they're naughty."
"I see that I have made a convert who is getting impatient to enter the lists late in life, haven't I, darling?" the brown-haired matron teased him as she took a puff of the cigarette, blew out rings which rose towards the ceiling, and then caressingly ran her fingertips over his then handed it back to him and stroked his belly limpened cock. "Well, Louise uses a little rubber dogwhip on her maid Hilda, because Hilda is big and sturdy and of course, quite a mature woman, and so the punishment must take effect. Janet gets a dose of the little whip too, whenever she's marked down for more than a hundred spanks, which frequently happens."
"So many?" he marveled. "But that sounds like torture!"
"She is much more severe than I am, in some ways, I'll admit," Eleanor murmured as she pressed her bare hip against her husband's and continued to fondle his cock in the hope of restoring it to vigor for a second engagement in erotic ecstasy. "But the skin is never broken, and the whip stings rather than cuts. She's an expert with it, and even after a rather severe spanking with it, in a few days Janet's plump white bottom hardly shows any marks. At times she uses a ruler on Tony, because a loud smacking is humiliating for him, and the same with Constance, though Constance has had her share of the little rubber dogwhip too. However, just before Betty and I left for Malibu, Louise told me that she had added a leather sole to the arsenal, and that it has made a howling success, to coin a rather obvious phrase. None of her three offspring likes it at all, not so much because it smacks and stings quite vigorously, but because of the loud and most disconcertingly embarrassing noise it makes. You see, darling, humiliation is a part of corporal punishment, a most important one from the psychological viewpoint. A teenager with any common sense at all eventually makes up his or her mind that if something is unpleasant, he or she is going to avoid it at all costs, which eventually makes for better behavior and more serious thinking on the subject of good conduct all around."
"I see," he said, impressed. "What about Mabel and Dave Carruthers?"
"Mabel is a great adherent of the hairbrush, which most of the time is the instrument used on Verna and Barbara. Dave, on the other hand, uses his hand, which is quite heavy, from what his girls ruefully tell me, and also his belt when Verna and Barbara have been especially naughty. As for Frieda Jamison, she prefers a pingpong paddle for minor offenses, and she has a special spanking strap which is very much like an old Scotch tawse."
"What in the world is that?" he wanted to know.
"It's a leather strap about twenty inches long, darling, with an extra thick piece at one end to be used as a grip, and the last three or four inches are cut at the other end into three separate fingers. It stings very painfully, I can assure you, especially when it has been prefaced with a good handspanking. Hank has on occasion used the paddle on the girls, but he still spanks his son Bob by hand, which seems to humiliate the boy a lot, and I understand that the last few months Bob has tried hard to avoid getting into trouble. And that is my exact point about all this, dear, because you mustn't think that all of us parents who spank our children do so out of unadulterated hostility or any perverse cruelty towards them. Quite the contrary. We have simply come to the conclusion that it's much more effective than stopping allowance or forbidding our children to go out to a movie or denying them rewards which in the main their good conduct has earned. A spanking is painful and embarrassing at the time, it serves to remind the culprit that he or she has marred a good-conduct record by a very silly and easily avoidable fault, and so it serves its purpose admirably."
"Yes, it seems to," he agreed. "But all this talk about it, Eleanor, is having an effect on me, as well as what you're doing right now."
"I take it," she winked naughtily at him, "that you are rather more affected by the erotic side of it, aren't you, lover? The way you were when you saw that lovely young bride in the house at Cuernavaca. Well, Arthur, very frankly, there is that side to spanking, too. Adults practice it among themselves for sexual stimulation, as you may have guessed. Why, in Los Angeles, I've heard there's even a club that calls itself the 'Swap 'n Spank Society' in which the members go in for wifeswapping and a little playful spanking to stimulate them to lovemaking."
"I guess I'll have to confess, darling, that's opened a new world of speculation to me." Arthur Hadley pulled his beautiful brown-haired wife to him, his mouth coming down passionately on hers, and at once her nimble pink tongue darted between his lips and he felt her arms and legs lock round him to accept him. His prick was nuzzling along her velvety inner thighs, rasping against the curly darkbrown tufts of pussyhair, which titillated him into a new awareness of desire. When the kiss was over, he added, his voice unsteady, "But I imagine that kind of domestic chastisement is rather playful instead of punitive."
"Sometimes it's both, darling. And there's no denying that when a man has a pretty girl over his lap and her bare bottom is upturned and wriggling and growing red and he hears her crying, he has a sense of mastery and domination which is very much like that which the lord of a harem enjoy. Just the same, a parent must make a very careful demarcation between the loveplay which he exercises with his own wife--or in the case of the woman the husband of course --and his daughter, because otherwise that would be venturing into a forbidden field. However," Eleanor said archly, as she snuggled closer, and tightened her hold round his shoulders, feeling his prick slip slowly down deep into her chasm, "that's another excellent reason why I'm so glad I've got a husband now. Because I will admit, since it's between the two of us right now, lover, that spanking Betty's pretty bottom often does get me excited. And while I was a widow, there wasn't any proper way to have any assuagement of those urges, which now, thank goodness, you are so wonderfully able to satisfy in me. Oh darling, give it to me hard! Dig your nails into my bummy! Love me, give it to me, yes, Arthur, oh my goodness, you're so wonderful, I'm ever so glad that beachball missed its mark!"