She was sick of hearing him whine at her about the baby. She thought it was unmanly, and frankly disgusting.
Gabriella's first beating occurred when she was three, on a morning when she accidentally knocked a plate off the breakfast table and broke it. Eloise had been sitting uneasily beside her, drinking her morning coffee. And without hesitating, the instant the plate fell, she reached over and slapped her.
“Don't ever do that again… do you understand?” Gabriella had simply stared at her, her eyes filled with tears, her face a mask of shock and sorrow. “Did you hear me?” she shouted at the child again. Her curls had reappeared by then, and the huge blue eyes stared back in confusion at her mother. “Answer me!”
“I sorry, Mommy…” John had just entered the room and saw what was happening with disbelief, but he was so shocked, he did nothing to stop it. He was afraid to interfere and make things worse. He had never seen Eloise so angry. Three years of anger, jealousy, and frustration were erupting from within, like a long-overdue volcano.
“If you ever do that again, Gabriella, I'll spank you!” Eloise said ominously, shaking the child by both arms until her teeth shook. “You're a very, very naughty girl, and no one likes naughty children.” Gabriella glanced from her mother's face suffused with rage, to her father standing in the doorway, but he said nothing. He was afraid to. And as soon as Eloise was aware of him, she scooped the child up in her arms, and took her back to her room, and left her there, without her breakfast. She gave her a sharp slap on her bottom before she left. Gabriella was lying on her bed, whimpering, when her mother left her to go back to breakfast.
“You didn't have to do that,” John said quietly when Eloise came back to the breakfast table for another cup of coffee. He could see that her hands were shaking, and she still looked angry.
“If I don't, you'll wind up with a juvenile delinquent on your hands one day. Discipline is good for children.” His own parents had been kind to him, and he was still startled by Eloise's reaction. But he was also well aware that their daughter made her extremely nervous. Eloise had never been quite the same since Gabriella was born, and nowadays she was always angry at him about something. His hopes for a large, happy family had long since vanished.
“I don't know what she did to upset you, but it couldn't have been that awful,” he said calmly.
“She threw a plate on the floor intentionally, and broke it. I'm not going to put up with tantrums!” Eloise said sharply.
“Maybe it was an accident,” he said, trying to mollify her, and succeeding only in making the situation worse. There was nothing he could ever say to defend their daughter. Eloise simply did not want to hear it.
“Disciplining Gabriella is up to me,” Eloise said through clenched teeth. “I don't tell you how to run your office,” she said, and then left the table.
Within six months, “disciplining” Gabriella became a full-time job for her mother. There was always some fresh crime she had committed that required a slap, a spanking, or a beating. Playing in the garden and getting grass stains on her knees, playing with the neighbors’ cat and getting her arm scratched, or her dress dirty, falling on the street and scraping her knees and getting blood all over her dress and socks was a particularly heinous offense that cost her her most serious beating to date, just before her fourth birthday. John knew of the beatings, and saw it happen many times, but he thought there was nothing he could do to stop Eloise, and even comforting the child afterward made it worse, and it became simpler to accept Eloise's explanations of why she had to beat, slap, or spank her. In the end, he decided it was best to say nothing, and he tried not to think about what was happening to their daughter. He tried to tell himself that maybe Eloise was right. He didn't know. Maybe discipline was good for children, if she said so.
His parents had died in an auto accident and there was no one he could talk to, no one he would have dared tell what Eloise did to Gabriella.
Gabriella was certainly a model child, she barely spoke, cleared the table carefully, folded her clothes neatly in her room, did