by Allen Bare
She stuck out her lower lip and muttered that she still disagreed.
“Well, the Board’s decision stands, and you have no choice but to take your punishment. Unless you want to leave Emberley immediately and not come back—you still have that alternative. What do you say?”
“I can’t do that,” she said sullenly.
“All right, then, let’s get it over with.” I took the paddle from my desk and sat down on the bench. “Come over here.”
Ronnie’s lightly freckled face went scarlet, and over she came. At my order she reached under her navy skirt and slipped down her panties; then, yielding to the gentle pressure of my hand on her shoulder, she placed herself face down across my knees. She was a short, square-shouldered young woman with, as I saw when I lifted her skirt, a plump and rosy bottom, neatly framed between navy skirt and white slip on one side and navy panties with white polka dots on the other. Ronnie’s bottom wasn’t blushing—not yet, anyway—but her face, neck, and ears radiated so much heat I could almost feel it. I set about imparting heat of a different sort to her hindquarters, and soon had them hopping and glowing. The freshman squirmed and twisted, but only kicked out once or twice. This physical quietness, however, she made up for vocally, shouting loud Ows and Ouches, and several times ordering me to Quit it! although she seemed to have no expectation that I would. I decided to interpret this command as an involuntary response to pain rather than an inexcusable instance of disrespect for my office.
When Ronnie’s quivering bottom had attained a bright shade of carmine, and she appeared to be on the verge of hysterics, I decided that justice had been done, and let her up. She sobbed and snuffled as she rearranged her clothing, and could not resist cradling one haunch tenderly in her hand as she left the office.
I stuck my head out the door. “Virginia Saltonstall,” I called. A tall, thin, lank-haired blonde sophomore responded reluctantly to this summons. Virginia, despite her surname, did not belong to the famous Boston family, or perhaps she belonged to some branch of it that had disgraced itself in the distant past and been banished to the Midwest. She hailed from a fancy suburb of Minneapolis. From the discussion of her case by the Board, I gathered that Virginia’s main problem was being almost terminally lackadaisical. She never actually defied Emberley’s rules, but she could seldom manage to organize herself well enough to comply with them. An impressive number of paddlings during her freshman year had brought about little improvement, and no one seemed surprised that she was back again, the first member of her class to renew her acquaintance with the paddle.
It wasn’t that Virginia was by any means impervious to chastisement. Indeed, an air of genuine distress was overlaid on her languid drowsiness this morning, and it was obvious that she thoroughly dreaded what was coming. Her eyes darted immediately to the paddle where it lay on the bench, and she had a hard time taking them off it, even when I spoke to her.
“Well, Miss Saltonstall, it doesn’t seem you’re off to a very good start. Sleeping through not one but two classes! That’s no way to get an education.”
“No, sir,” she mumbled.
“Well, we’ll have to try to educate you by other means,” I said sadly. “The paddle is a relatively crude instrument, and I’m sure it won’t teach you as much as you would have learned in those two classes, but it does have the virtue of being hard to ignore.”
A reddening of her face was the only response.
“Very well, Miss Saltonstall,” I said, taking my place on the bench. “Come over here. You know what to do.”
Resignedly, she crossed the short distance between us and reached under her long skirt to make the necessary adjustments. I patted her arm, and she bent over my lap. The woolen skirt, a subdued gray plaid, was full as well as long, and I had no difficulty raising it to bare Virginia’s pale, rather flat buttocks and long thighs, around which a pair of pink cotton panties clung droopingly. I resolved to make this spanking a real waker-upper, if that was possible for such a student.
I didn’t spank Virginia harder than I had spanked any of the others, nor did I give her a greater number of whacks. In fact, her spanking was over in about half the usual time, because I increased the tempo and spanked her at twice the usual speed. This apparently caused the sting to build up to a hellacious level in no time at all, without much possibility of subsiding between blows, and the effect on poor, lackadaisical Virginia was electrifying. She kicked, bucked, and thrashed so violently that it took an effort to hold her in place, and her mouth opened wide to let out a fire-siren howl of misery and panic. She was nearly in orbit by the time I finished, and it took a considerable time before she was able to stop bawling and rubbing her blazing bottom cheeks, which the paddle had turned an appropriate shade of crimson. She hadn’t been hurt unduly, but she had been shocked and scared. Maybe this shock treatment would have a beneficial effect—time would have to tell.
The sounds coming faintly through the heavy door had clearly had a profound effect on the remaining student, a petite blonde junior named Maura Royce. Her teeth were practically chattering. I recalled from the Board’s discussion that she had not been a frequent offender in the past, and supposed that she might have been reduced to this abject state merely by the prospect of a paddling, even without the sonic spectacle she had just overheard. I spoke to her quietly, and as soothingly as the business between us would permit. Maura jumped to comply with my every request, and I was not surprised, when she finally took her face-down position and I placed my left hand on her back, to find her small body vibrating like a tuning fork. Maura obviously liked dressing as the rich girl she was, and I found her pretty little bottom surrounded by an opulent froth of impressively crafted lingerie. (Perhaps she had had it made to order in Paris.) Everything was white, but decorated with rich insets of lace and little highlights of embroidery. I almost wanted to pull her panties back up again (for, or course, she had pulled them down before getting into position) in order to admire them properly, but this impulse I was wise enough to suppress.
As I’ve mentioned, Maura was petite, no more than five feet tall, and neatly proportioned to that scale. The spankable portion of her bottom was hardly bigger than what the paddle covered when I brought it down, and I resolved to take it a bit easy, since every smack would be landing in more or less the same location. Still, it was possible to alter the attack in various ways to avoid brutal and monotonous pounding. One blow could be angled to catch the broadest surface of the outer buttock, where it sloped from the summit outward toward the hip. The next could be aimed to catch the same surface of the other buttock, and a third to come straight down across the crowns of both. I could also angle a blow to catch the lowest and fullest part of either cheek, or both together, and lift the flesh upward so that it rippled and shook. All of these variations I alternated in random order, seeing to it that, while Maura's plump little backside was not pounded to a pulp, nevertheless she had no reason to enjoy the time she spent over my knee.
It was clear that she did not enjoy it; she kicked her small feet in the air and pounded the floor with her tiny fists while wailing a high-pitched song of repentance. When the wincing flesh had reached a shade that contrasted shockingly with the pristine underwear surrounding it, I stopped and let her up, turning courteously aside while the culprit recomposed her clothing and got her dancing under control.
That was, I reflected as she departed, sniffling, an even dozen spankings I had administered in my official capacity at Emberley. “Twelve of the best,” was Frances Potter’s phrase, though I understood that she meant something different. (Indeed, in Frances’s sense of the term, I had administered something closer to twelve hundred, though they probably wouldn’t qualify as “the best” from the viewpoint of a former English schoolgirl.)
During the week I had seen Connie several times a day, always in the presence of others. We conducted our business in a cordial but professional manner, neither of us alluding to the events of the previous Saturday. Now I picked up t
he phone and dialed her office number.
“Do you need me to come in?” she asked, as soon as she heard my voice.
“No, no problems this morning,” I answered. “This call is more social in nature.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” I said. “As you know, Zeb's annual reception for the faculty and staff is Saturday night. I was wondering if you’d be free to join me for dinner and then come along to the party with me. As a newcomer, I’d appreciate having an, um, native guide.”
Connie laughed. “Yes, of course. How should we handle the transportation?”
“I’ll pick you up at half-past six,” I said.
“It’s a deal.”
No further disciplinary problems arose that week. Saturday evening I found Connie ready when I came to collect her. Both of us were careful not to act like lovers; we behaved as if it was our first date, which, if you wanted to get really technical, it was. I had made reservations at the best of the local restaurants I had found so far, and it turned out to be a favorite of Connie’s as well. We had a very pleasant meal and a bottle of impressive California wine, while we filled each other in on the considerable parts of both our lives that had preceded our meeting a few weeks earlier.
I learned that Connie’s family wealth had evaporated within a couple of years after her graduation from Emberley. “Actually, I guess it had been disappearing slowly over a long time,” she said, “but no one knew that except Daddy. He was a fine lawyer, but a terrible investor, and, being a Southern gentleman of the old school, he kept all the money business to himself. I’m sure he thought he’d gain back everything he’d lost, but he had a stroke he wasn’t planning on, and he died of a heart attack a couple of months after that. When we took stock of his estate, there was hardly anything left; even a good part of his insurance had been borrowed on. There was just enough to keep Mama in respectable circumstances until she died last year, but nothing was left for Billy and me. It was clear right away we’d have to join the working world.”
“How did you feel about that?” I asked.
“Not totally bummed out, as a matter of fact,” Connie said. “Emberley, in its inimitable way, had forced me to discover that I had a mind I could use for something more interesting than being one of the Belles of Birmingham. I applied for a fellowship at Chapel Hill and earned my master’s in psychology, with a specialty in counseling, and since Emberley had an open position, it just seemed natural to come back here. I’d managed to get pretty fond of the place by the time I finished. Mama would have wanted me to stay around Birmingham if we could have afforded to maintain our social position, but since we couldn’t she understood that it was better if I pursued my career somewhere else.”
“She wasn’t ill, then?”
“Oh, no, she was just fine until a few months before she died—then she was diagnosed with cancer, and almost before we had time to adjust to that she was gone. Fortunately, we got the news at the beginning of the summer, and I was able to take a leave of absence to be with her until she died.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, a little awkwardly, not sure if it was the right thing to say. But Connie seemed to understand my desire to empathize. I had lost both of my own parents not so long ago.
“How about your brother Billy?” I asked her.
“Oh, he did all right. He finished Ole Miss with a little help from a student loan, and went to work for a newspaper. Then he did advertising for a while. Now he and some buddies of his are running a restaurant in Atlanta.”
“Sounds like a success.”
“Well, it’s just getting started, but I’m sure it will be. Billy’s a smart boy, and Atlanta is his kind of town. It’s probably a good thing he never got to fulfill his destiny as one of the gilded youth of Birmingham. That might have ruined him forever.”
“Birmingham?”
“Oh, no, just being a gilded youth. Some people seem to be able to have any amount of money and leisure and not be the least bit spoiled by it, but I don’t think Billy is that kind. He’s a much nicer person now than he was before Daddy died.”
I filled Connie in on the general outlines of my life story, and then it was time to go to the party.
I needn’t have worried about needing a native guide. Patsy Kesselmann, Zeb’s wife, took me in hand immediately, and made a point of introducing me to everybody. I’d already met more than half the faculty, but I hadn’t met any of their spouses, and there were three new appointees whom Patsy was also ushering around. She would introduce one of us to a cluster of people, leave us there, and be back in five minutes to take us somewhere else if we hadn’t moved on already. All four of us were kept in more or less constant circulation; it was an impressive performance by an obvious master of the art. Now and then I caught glimpse of Connie, on the other side of the room, chatting with one group or another. I think both of us were happy not to spend the evening as a public couple, since we hadn’t really worked out what our status was going to be.
One of the new faculty members was a historian named Ed Ruggles, whom I liked immediately. He and his wife Jo, a tall, pretty blonde, had a semi-athletic, sort of outdoorsy look, and turned out to be avid cross-country skiers. Since that is also an enthusiasm of mine, we got off on the right foot, and Ed also turned out to be a specialist in 19th-century American history, something I’ve always enjoyed reading about. Another newcomer was Kate Marinetti, who was here to teach medieval English literature. There was nothing medieval about Kate’s appearance, however; she was not yet out of her twenties, a thin, graceful woman with a brilliant smile, long, jet-black hair, and eyes almost as dark. We had little chance to talk, being whirled here and there at the mercy of Patsy Kesselmann's efficient Mixmaster plan, but it was enough to show me that Kate was quick-witted as well as pretty. She was a bit young for me, but, if things didn’t work out with Connie . . . .
Within a couple of hours all of us newcomers had exchanged at least a few words with everybody there, and Patsy left us to our own devices. I quickly sought out Ed Ruggles, hoping he’d be willing to pick up the thread of an interesting conversation we’d been having about the origins of the Republican Party when Patsy had swooped down an hour earlier to send us off in different directions. We were hard at it when Jo came up, holding a glass of wine. She listened for a bit, and then made a face. “Come on, you guys, this is a party. Don’t spend the whole evening talking shop.”
I smiled apologetically. “It may be talking shop for Ed, but I’m just a fascinated layman. It’s a rare chance for me.”
“Oh, that’s right, you’re the Dean of Students. What’s that all about? What’s a Dean of Students do?”
Ed grinned. “Jim relieves us all of the tiresome burden of thrashing the students.”
Jo's smile froze, vanished. “That’s your job?”
“Well, there’s a bit more to it than that,” I said. “But that’s certainly part of it.”
“A nasty job, but someone has to do it,” Ed chortled. All of us had had quite a bit of wine by this time. Jo was clearly not amused.
“How can you stand to earn a living that way?” she demanded. “Beating up women?”
“Aw, come on, honey,” said Ed unhappily.
“Hold on a minute, I don’t beat anyone up,” I said. “It happens to be the policy of this college to enforce its rules with corporal punishment. All the students understand that and agree to it before they come. If they want to change their minds after they get here, they can do that, but they have to accept the rules if they want to stay, and that means accepting the punishments. When they break the rules, or slack off in their work, they know they’ve earned a paddling. Because the college hired me in this position, I’m the guy that does the paddling. That’s all.”
“Excuse me, but I don’t quite see the difference.”
“Well, I hope you never experience either one, but if you did, you’d have no trouble seeing the difference.”
“Enlighten me,” she said sarcastically.
I wasn’t enjoying this much, and Ed was looking miserable, but I persevered. “Beating up is when a physically stronger person attacks a physically weaker one with the object of hurting that person. It has no real connection with the victim’s prior behavior, although the attacker may claim that it has. As most people understand the phrase, beating someone up involves hitting them with the fists, possibly other objects, or kicking them. There are no restraints or controls outside the will of the attacker, who is often out of control. All right?”
She nodded.
“Corporal punishment, at least in the Emberley context, is a measured penalty incurred as the consequence of behavior for which the student knows in advance it will be the consequence. The object is negative reinforcement. The student is certainly hurt—that’s the essence of the punishment—but hurting is not the object; it’s a means to an end, which is to discourage recurrence of the bad behavior.”
“Yes, but—”
“I haven’t finished. A paddling hurts, but the idea is to make it hurt just enough to achieve its goal. No student is subjected to more pain than she can stand—paddlings stop way short of that.”
“Always?”
“Always. After all, they aren’t administered in a state of fury. I won’t say there’s no physical damage, but it’s very slight, it’s out of sight, and it only lasts a few days. You won’t see students around the campus with black eyes, bandages, or splints. No paddling has ever put an Emberley student in the hospital. Beatings often have that effect.”
“Well, all right, but—”
“One more thing. There’s nothing arbitrary about an Emberley punishment. When one person beats up another—I don’t mean gangland enforcers and people like that, but let’s take the common case of child abuse or spouse-battering—the attacker is judge and jury. At Emberley, a punishment is decided either by the Discipline Board or the Counseling Office. I’m just one vote on the board, and I’m never the prosecuting attorney. I have nothing to do with decisions by the Counseling Office. I have no control over which students will show up in my office to be punished. I don’t decide who should be punished; I don’t decide why they should be punished; and except for a certain amount of leeway within well-established limits, I don’t decide how severely they should be punished. I just carry out the sentences.”
