Chapter 1
Day of Reckonings
"Not a wholly satisfactory essay, I fear."
Professor Gustavus Fielding Porter reached for the blue book on his austere, worm-scarred 18th Century desk. The late August sun burned through the redwood-slatted Venetian blinds.
Judy Latimer took the essay book from him as if it were an angry cobra. Her eyes darted to her older sister with a touching desperation.
"Too little learning can be a dangerous thing." Helen Latimer patted the girl's tawny mane. "I'll leave you two to get on with specifics."
Judy stood outlined against the window, slowly rolling the blue book into a tight tube. Porter escorted her sister out of his study.
"Remember, professor," Helen spoke softly as they passed English hunting prints and startling New Guinea masks decorating the hallway. "Judy came through your gate a virgin. She should exit through it equally intact."
"Not subtle, but commendably succinct." He paused in the entry way while she plucked his tutorial fee from her purse. Accepting the check, he opened the paneled blond oak front door. Classic California summer heat mantled them as he bowed her out onto the masonry stoop.
Helen stood in the probing sunlight, gazing at the tree-dotted Orinda street. Beyond the brick and wrought iron fence, a gunmetal open SEL convertible waited at the curb. A man in his thirties watched them behind blue mirror shades.
Porter placed his name as something clerical. Helen had introduced him at a party. Jonathan . . . Parrish . . . Chancery ... no, Vestry; that was it.
The woman turned back suddenly, tilting her face upward. Her lips met the professor's in a swift, probing kiss. His English propriety felt deliciously scandalized.
Then her cool, brunette beauty retreated down the summer-scorched stone path.
Porter studied the tight sway of her posterior and closed his front door reluctantly. He flexed his robust shoulders. He'd been approaching 40 when he'd tutored dear Helen. 1977, 1978-could it have been so long ago?
She'd worn her hair longer, then. He'd often compelled her to rubber-band the black locks into a pony tail, heightening the juvenile effect when he made her fetch the tawse or one of his canes before her lesson.
She genuflected to set the instrument across his knees as he sat on his battle-worn Ashanti tribe stool. The wide, moon-curving seat rested upon the stylized image of a crocodile devouring a fish. Age and use had given the wood a venerable black patina.
She'd sat cross-legged before him as he tutored her in both his bread-and-butter discipline, physics, and his coy mistress, literature. She stumbled less in the precise realms of hard science.
Still, a clumsily executed theoretical proof or inattention to detail in researching experiments merited the girl punishment. He wistfully recalled the slap of hard leather against her pale, bare bottom.
A forest green sweater framing her round hips ... the wisp of ebony straying between her strained thighs ... the fire-toughened fingers mauling her right cheek as the split-end Scots whipping strap lashed once-twice-thrice!
She held her cries until six or seven. He had her choking down grunts thereafter. He punished. She wiped her eyes. The lesson continued, Helen kneeling on the rug, skirt and panties forfeited.
Lithe and wild in his arms, she'd responded more vocally to him later. Now, he sighed, salt and pepper dusted his broad mustache. He fringed 50 and some damn fool had called off the Sexual Revolution.
"Fair?" He rhetorically addressed a four foot tall Sepik River face seamed with incised half-moon designs. The tiny fanged mouth and cowrie shell eyes resembled the homocidal Queen encountered on the croquet fields of Wonderland.
"I ask you, sir. Where's the justice in altering the rules while I'm still hot for the game?"
He strolled back to his study. Judy had an appealingly fragile aspect in her lace-collared, berry-colored dress. The garment concealed her hip curve and breast swell in its pleats.
He remembered his Aunt Lola wearing a similar ankle-length gown as he romped on her lawn, home from Eton for the Long Vacation. Fortunately, dear Auntie Lo had been a cabaret dancer of no small ability before her marriage. She read to him in French from pre-War volumes appetizingly illustrated by Franz von Bayros and the mad, carnal Felicien Rops.
The tender association bolstered his professional smile as he gazed fondly at Judy.
"Don't worry so. You know the cane only stings a short while."
"Two or three days," Judy whispered demurely. Her lustrous gold-chased brown hair hung about her resigned face.
"I called it not wholly satisfactory. Yet," he rounded the desk to shut the blinds, "your organization had merit. You showed a clean grasp of Judge Woolsey's decision on Ulysses and of the Orwell terminology."
He drew the drapes and clicked on the floor lamp. As shadows changed, the African statuary atop bookcases and shelves seemed to shift about in anticipation.
"I thought your main theme diffused, however. The argument spent its energy in cluttered eddies of thought."
He hung his coat on a bronze serpent projecting from a Beaux Arts cloak tree. Three straight-handled Malaccas of differing lengths waited in a stick stand. He chose the 28-inch one.
A laser-straight British whipping cane, the handle had a cork wrap to enhance grip. The tip thickened percept\h\\ at the striking end.
"In acknowledgement of your very definite achievement in the essay, I shall permit you to retain your panties."
He wrenched the pencil-thin rattan in a tight arc and released it. The wood sprang straight, quivering with leashed fire.
Judy timidly placed her twisted essay book on a three-shelf bookcase, an offering before the blind, arrogant majesty of a carven Kuba king. She hiked her mid-calf dress slowly up her bare legs. The pleated cotton furled about her waist.
"What a charming color," Porter appreciated as the lowest triangle of her French-cut briefs came into view. "Does it have some coy designer name?"
"Uh, Blushed Beige." Judy bunched her dress higher.
"How prophetic." He watched the elastic waist band branded JOCKEY appear.
"You've had enough toe touching this summer. Let's try an innovation."
The cane swept toward a chromed steel tube fixed horizontally between two mighty mahogany bookcases. "You know the bar."
Indeed, he'd had her clutching at it, legs and naked cheeks spread for pedagogic effect while the tawse encouraged good scholarship.
"Lie on your back, head toward the wall. Make believe you're about to do that bicycle exercise your California gym teachers love so much."
The corners of her mouth quivered downward at the indignity. She wiggled onto the floor. Her hips rocked up, the weight going onto her shoulders. Legs waivered in the air till she tucked her ankles under the chromed bar. Her arms thrust flat to the floor, palms down, bracing her body.
"Admirable. Can you work yourself just a hair further from the wall, rounding that rump just a significant bit more?"
Her spine rippled, wormlike, as she crept that extra inch toward him. Her buttocks tightened, jutting apple-firm, ripe with the temptations of Eden.
He could scent the released heat from her body, damply spiced with girl-fear. Her eyes fluttered at him as the cane rose. He whipped the pliant stick downward, feeling it curve in the air.
The wood jolted along the length of one single cheek. The impact sang up his arm. The lithe shaft burrowed into panty and taut muscle, down the line of the V-cut leghole.
The girl's tremors ran through the cane. He let the punishing sting build, crest. . . . The Malacca flashed up and down again, before she could blink. Her shoulders twisted as the second lancing cut radiated pain.
Alas, her solid-colored briefs permitted no joyful sight of the swelling wealage. He concentrated on her panged, inverted squirms.
A third whistling stroke landed dead into the meaty curve of her Blush Beige buttock. Her lips bared her teeth as she whimpered.
He moved a bit to the right and flogged the other buttock. Three clean, hard licks marched from the center toward the panty edge.
He stared down at her. She looked lovely in red-faced distress, the breath hissing between set teeth.
"Six for an imperfect essay. Do you remember your first Hue book, in June?"
She gave a moist gasp of assent.
"A much more painful experience back then, wasn't it? You've improved markedly. You may rise."
She uncurled stiffly, each motion of her bottom plainly hurting. Under his tutorial gaze, she got to her feet and lowered her clothes. Her hands batted at wrinkles. She smoothed her disordered hair.
"Perhaps we should indulge in a moment before your oral recitation." He gestured toward the door.
She nodded gratefully. His eyes followed her panged carriage as she tiptoed away to wee. "Now, Judy, why did Connie dance naked in the rain?" Porter leaned forward in his brass-bound dark oak swivel chair. One hand pressed on his knee to communicate interest. The girl stood before him, her palms gingerly comforting her bottom.
She plainly longed to be elsewhere. Yet her eyes glazed and rote memory clicked in faithfully.
"According to Dr. Lyman Dean Carter, the dance symbolized the spiritually rich but physically impoverished Rousseauian individual, whom the British Empire had failed to imprison in the meshes of our Western Civilization's techno-pragmatic materialist trappings, and who would soon wed the socially revolutionary vitality-"
"Potency," the professor emphasized. "That's a key word in discussions of Lady Chatterley.'' "-potency symbolized by John Thomas in the novel and visible in the contemporary cultural sphere as Gandhi-"
"Mohandas Gandhi. Show you know more than the average film-watcher."
"-Mohandas Gandhi, whose Satyagraha teachings are represented-"
"Embodied," he enunciated firmly. "That's a very fleshy-sounding word and it's important to give corporeal heft to discussions of Lawrence."
"-embodied in the text as Lady Jane, the passive maistrye ..." She paused, uncertain of the Chaucerian syllables.
"You have the pronunciation. Very good."
"... maistrye arising from the natural forces, which absolutely vitiate Clifford, the aristocratic figure of decayed technarchy, but which renew the class-transcending consciousness latent in Mellors' . . . uh . . . peter principle."
"Lingam principle." Porter gave a curt nod to encourage her. "Quite good. It's vital to do it all in one, sustained breath so no one can interrupt and seize the floor. Never inhale while stating a thesis or you sacrifice the initiative."
He put a second hand on his knee and peered with theatrical intensity at her apprehensive eyes. "But. Never. Ever. Even begin. To let them know. That you refer privately to the central sexual symbols of the novel as 'Dick' and 'Jane.' "
"No, sir." She bobbed her head enthusiastically.
"I mean it. That's bloody meat waved before academic wolves. This is psycho-social interpretation of great literature based on historical-pastoral-" He caught himself. "Urn, tragical-pastoral . . ."
Porter let her see an abashed grin. "Now I'm doing it also. In a real discussion, the pack would swarm over me and rend my living carcass."
He cleared his throat dramatically. "A psycho-social interpretation based on the historio-symbolic school of preter-conscious criticism, pioneered by dear Dr. Carter. This is serious stuff, not The National Lampoon."
"Please, Professor Porter," Judy quivered at the edge of earnest tears. "I won't ever call Mr. Mellors' pud 'Dick' or 'Peter' again."
"Of course you won't." He sighed. "Don't mistake the dangly thing for a penis, though. Boys have willies. Lawrence dealt in eroto-political art, not glandular fiction. Males in novels-in 'emotiodramatic word scenarios' as the learned Dr. Carter affectionately styles them-male literary figures have lingams. Female counterparts have yonis."
He followed the anxious emotions in her face as she gradually comprehended that he wouldn't whip her for the lapse.
Actually, Lying Dog Carter's preter-conscious rubbish bored him intensely. Unfortunately, his old Oxford lecture hall mate had established his convoluted analyses as The In Trend, suitable for Feminist Literary Theory as well as for classic, dottering Freudian Patriarchal Models.
Porter wished that he could read about Connie Chatterley frolicking jaybird in the drizzle just once more with a proper hard-on, instead of having to summon up Carter's dynamic synthesis of Havelock Ellis and Arnold Toynbee . . .
. . . unless he'd combined Henry Spencer Ashbee and H.G. Wells. Porter recalled Lying Dog's fervid babblings about "seminal outpourings of pucilous Eloi" in The Time Machine. Small wonder that he himself had concentrated on adding a physics doctorate after picking off his litterarum baccalaureus.
He marshalled his thoughts. He was there to tutor a girl about to enter her freshman year in college. He had hired himself out to sharpen her scholastic in-fighting skills, not to have fun talking about books.
"Now, Judy, you told me you liked the ending, where Connie does a bunk with her husband's gamekeeper. Very well. Tell me why you ought to like it."
Judy's hand massaged her stung flank as her tutor sliced a dark, sharply fragrant Macintosh apple into wedges with an ivory-handled straight razor.
"No, really." He laid pale, red-veined lengths on the cheese board by the squares of smoked German Bruder Basil. "I'm fascinated by this sorority bid of yours. Another girl I know has the same itch.
"We Britons can't avoid our public school heritage. My generation and class could no more shirk the rigors of Eton and its ilk than a Pacific Coast pelican could avoid absorbing DDT. Both hazards came with the era.
"It defeats me why a young woman with full freedom to choose would elect a sorority such as Sigma Epsilon Xi, which proudly advertises how stringently it will restrict her liberty."
Judy hesitantly took a bit of cheese and slid it onto some apple. "I guess ... I don't know why you wouldn't, I mean ..."
She eloquently rubbed her caned bottom as she munched the snack. He watched her dress tighten and ease over the tender gluteal muscles. The sunlight from his dining room window touched her milky ankle.
"It's like you taught me about poetry, sort of." She fought to frame the concept. "There's this regular structure, an organized flow of things-like rhythm and meter and all that. We can be free within it and stronger because of that ... I guess it's like a skeleton. Without bones, we'd be a blob, sorta like an amoeba. That's free, but . . ."
She tilted her shoulders in a shrug, thrusting a fetching hip toward him. "Jonathan says everything's more rigid on the East Coast. I mean, they had Dukakis and we had Jerry Brown. Whole different heads. I guess a lot of people-lot of girls, particularly, want more framework. To give strength, not to just lock them up in a closet like Patty Hearst."
"I begin to comprehend." He furrowed his brow. "My terribly old-fashioned Old World British ways have become fashionable again, in this post-Warhol world. I've watched young ladies waft through Sigma House without comprehending-and there's a champion example, there."
She followed his glance and saw Lucretia Sue Merydith swaying along the sidewalk. Her smile broke out. "She's part of the reason I want to pledge. She's alum adviser to the new girls this year. I really want to get into her Basic Bio class next term, too."
"I've admired her as a colleague since she's been a lecturer at St. Cloud." The professor recalled the earlier attentions he'd bestowed during her very full course of his tutelage.
The six-foot redhead's body had been explosive and captivating, pliant as whalebone and rugged enough for the sports he loved best. A year at public school as an exchange student in England had polished some facets of the rough Georgian diamond, but she'd come to him with cold determination to have him finish the job. Her will had impressed him, and her stamina had led him to take her further than any girl he'd privately instructed.
Regret tinged his rosy memories. The woman who had blossomed under his hand now stood at the center of her own orchard, a revered alumna at Sigma, a graduate student already teaching as she thundered toward her doctorate.
He studied Judy Latimer. A sweet kid, and enough said.
"More apple?" He brandished the cut-throat razor over the cheese board.
"Why are you such an impossibly horny pig today, Mr. Scott Madrigal, hmmm?" The woman shifted her legs, which had been coiled on the park bench, so that he could burrow further down her black and grey skirt's waistband.
The pressure of his hand inside her pantihose, against her stone-chilled fanny cheek, felt warmly reassuring. A cold wind whipped along under slate-grey sky. Slivers of blue appeared and vanished in San Francisco Bay as the sun fought the overcast.
Nora Quincannon knew vaguely that the rest of the Bay Area languished in summer's heat. In the city, God's air conditioning lashed at the tiny Russian Hill park with full icy fury.
She loved the dank San Francisco climate. "Nora, I just don't believe this sorority thing of yours." Scott's breath tingled along her ear, down onto her neck where her hair had whipped back.
"I've been dogpaddling in the business world almost ten years. You and the people I know at Sherman and Michaels make up my whole social life. That's it." The woman hoped he understood her frustration.
"Okay, going back to college makes a pretty big change after the real world." Under her wool skirt and nylon pantihose, his hand reacquainted itself with familiar, friendly curves. "But a Greek letter hen house?"
He kissed her eyes, her chin, her fog-cool lips. Her errogenous zones blazed.
"I respect you for returning to school, but you're almost thirty. You just can't go home again." His voice vibrated against her cheek as she nuzzled his neck. Hairs he'd missed shaving prickled her skin. "I graduated from college seven years ago-"
"Sally Klein swore she'd give me a recommendation to Sigma Epsilon Xi."
He turned rigid against her. His fingers pressed stiffly into her bottomcheek.
"That's a . . . there's this gal at The Daily Cal who's in their Berkeley chapter. She claimed she couldn't sit for the first seven weeks of class."
His intense concern thrilled her. "Sally described it pretty graphically."
"Really? They walloped her when she didn't say 'please' and paddy whacked her when she said 'cheese.' I mean, writing for the paper at Berkeley I know that college is a whole different mindset from real life. Okay. But those gals are far fucking out."
She loved it as his free hand closed protectively over her breasts. "The hard part, big guy, will be giving you up during the Boy Ban. That's the total embargo on private dating from the first day of class until the Harvest Festival in . . . in . . ."
"October," he finished for her.
She twisted her face up to stare at him.
"Hey, I knew someone out at St. Cloud." He squeezed her reassuringly. "Harvest's the big party season opener. Hallowe'en, Veteran's, Thanksgiving-Playboy may give Chico State the rep, but St. Cloud knows how to boogie down-and-dirty. The action's right here in the Bay Area."
"Orinda? A party capital? Oop!" She struggled to sit up. "Get your hand out, now." She pulled herself up and leaned against him, crushing his buried palm between her flesh-padded right ischial bone and the stone bench.
A couple rounded the trees. He had a blue windbreaker and camera. A cap jammed tightly on his grey hair. She hugged at herself in her red and orange sweats. Sun had sizzled her skin to deeply seamed leather.
"How do you people live like this?" The woman demanded. "It's over 100 degrees in Tulsa!"
"That's why I stay in San Francisco." Nora felt the band on Scott's class ring bite at her bottom.
The guy in the windbreaker laughed. "They got ways of keeping warm, Alice. Figure it out." His eyes lingered. "I'll show you back at the Hyatt."
The tourists passed on.
Steam hammered and spat in the pipes heating Nora's trim studio apartment. She straddled her naked lover's chest on her open sofa bed. The stereo competed with the radiator, trying to wrap them in the tide pull of Debussy's La Mer.
Scott's fingers kept their own tempo, diddling with her breasts at an adagio appassionato pace. The University of California class ring brushed her left nipple again and again. She yearned for a fat, gaudy ring with St. Cloud University's emblem.
"Most of what I did at Chabot will transfer," she murmured dreamily. "In a couple of years, I'll have a real degree-not just units toward an A.A."
He bucked his hips, prodding her bare buttocks with his rubber-armored cock. "Hey, are we fucking or mapping your game plan for the future?"
"I just thought you'd care to know," her lips made a slow circuit of his cheeks and forehead, "that I intend to keep this place. I'll need it when I graduate."
He laced his fingers together at the nape of her neck, under her dark, rust-colored hair. She felt his strength as an insistent tug pulled her torso so that one elongated nipple entered his mouth.
"Besides, they don't house pledges. I couldn't live there for six months-assuming they'll have me, anyway."
His teeth marked a generous bite of tit. An exquisite fever scored her skin. He licked and nibbled, the hot flesh flaring with sensation.
The whole idea of a female support group seemed elusive and gossamer-thin. Nora remembered that party group Donna Earl had wanted to start-five or six women friends who'd throw regular, serious get-togethers so they could all meet and share new men.
Silly idea. She had Scott, after all. Other kinds of female support . . . maybe Sigma and St. Cloud had them; probably they didn't. A gamble. Maybe he had it right, some kind of bid for missed youth. A Peggy Sue Got Married trip on a college campus ...
"Boy Ban." Scott had started kissing along her upper ribs. She knew the routine and readied herself to rise on all fours, "Joy Ban."
His lips and tongue gently inflamed her belly as she straightened up on her four limbs. He slid further under her, kissing her cunt, his teeth teasing the blood-hot labia.
She clambered around over him, putting her knees behind his head. She faced the dark, latex-shrouded prick.
His tongue's lavish attentions drove her mouth down onto the impatient fleshy horn. The taste always reminded her of a dental clinician's gloved finger impersonally engorging her mouth. She sucked away, eager to get through that ritual section of their foreplay.
To the east of San Francisco Bay, behind the Berkeley hills, the shallow valley holding Orinda felt the late summer heat beat on dry trees and drought-burned lawns.
Six feet from her heel-less sandals to her carroty-haired scalp, Lucretia Sue Merydith ambled down the walkway toward the sorority house front door. Fat shingled pillars supported the porch roof that shielded the full width of the building's street side.
That classic Southern California architecture had been imported into the Bay Area sometime in the 1920's. St. Cloud University had been a lonely bible college, lost amid the hills of brown grass.
After its conversion to a full-range institution of higher learning, the school had accepted Sigma Epsilon Xi as its first Greek organization. The years had not treated that pioneering heritage kindly, Lucretia Sue reflected.
She swung open the beveled glass door and stepped into the cool entry hall. The Social Room on her right seemed deserted and forgotten. She had taken her B.A. only three years previously, and she remembered when it would have been alive with actives, even this early before the term began.
She turned toward the dining room and caught sight of a thoughtful Gerry Vestry.
"Well hug me blue and call me Babe," the tall Georgian drawled, "I thought that straggly-haired mess who yelled 'Suckers!' at us in Mardi Blanc had a familiar flip to her fanny. I should have recognized those tinsley li'l glasses of yours, but I never expected to see any Sigmas running for the boat fit to rupture a lung."
Gerry Vestry's mouth curved ruefully under her silver-rimmed spectacles. "That exit caning had me distracted, or I'd have known that flame-topped mop. This kid at the Customs Shed could really hit. But I guess you found that out."
She winced eloquently.
"Rank Hath Its ever-loving Privileges, sugar," Lucre-tia Sue informed. "My friend Ju's daddy, the local baronet, just oozes with it. He posted a bond in lieu of that tenderizing stick-though it did give us a wholesome fright until they learned whose kin she was."
"I can't believe it!" The blonde gaped. "You should have protested. That vile entry and exit caning routine is Mardi Blanc's most memorable custom."
Her sorority sister nodded. "I believe. The island's quaint and 19th century-kissing cousin to a Bronte novel, in fact."
"The brochure that Jan Ladrone's Aunt Tilly showed us mentioned 'an unspoiled lifestyle' and 'extraordinary Victorian architecture.' She booked us for the rancid pit."
"Extraordinary captures it," Lucretia Sue nodded. "The jailhouse comes right out of Victor Hugo. Maybe Jan's auntie had some trepidations about her niece's still-marketable virtue being scuffed up by a Mayfair remittance man pastured out on Bermuda, or by some island stud working the Bimini tourist crop."
Gerry Vestry shuddered. "She picked the right shoal to maroon us on. My career as a duena dripped with success."
She poked her thumb toward the dining room. "We'd better go on in. A serious pow-wow, once Irene gets here."
"I do imagine. What's all this about accepting a bid by some 29-year-old sophomore?" Lucretia Sue followed the blonde, noting her still gingerly hip motions. "I'm the alumna adviser, the grand old lady of bonded and aged wisdom this year, and she's four years longer in the tooth than I am."