Flash and Filigree

by Terry Southern

  At the end, the officer, Eddy, was agape, as though still waiting for the punch-line, and Dr. Eichner had to shrug to show it was all over; so the other could give a long, low whistle and kick his foot in the gravel.

  Stockton cleared his throat.

  “Where do you work, Doctor?” he asked evenly. “That is, just where is your practice at?”

  Chapter IV

  WHEN ELEANOR THORNE returned to the clinic, she found Babs lying on a couch in Nurses’ Lounge with a cold compress across her head. They had lost the patient in 28.

  It was the first death at the Clinic in more than a month, yet it was the first death where Nurse Mintner had been in direct attendance, for it was she who had injected the coagulants—which had failed to take—and the patient, an extremely old man, had literally died in her arms.

  After it was all over, Miss Mintner had come into the rest-room to clean her shoes and change her soiled habit and stockings—so much once toward the end had the old man bled from his nose and mouth.

  But, at last, while taking off the ruin of her pure habit, at the close stretched shell of it all broken soft now, and black blood red, even as gutter-razed the white frozen rose, she had become genuinely faint and laid herself down there on the mohair couch in Nurses’ Lounge. Later, Beth Jackson came to draw a sheet around her double, whereas Babs, as stifled and feverish, had pushed it aside, and now she lay uncovered in her nylon blue slip.

  As Eleanor Thorne entered, closing the door behind her, the girl stirred softly, her half shadowed face turned slightly aside, broken now by the white angled rise of her arm, hand to brow on the ice filled cloth, as if there had been, exactly then, a danger of it all slipping down across her eyes and nose.

  Nurse Thorne stood quiet by the couch, waiting, it would seem, simply to put her hand on Babs’ shoulder, she who fluttered a little under the touch, like a waking butterfly, then turned her eyes soft at Eleanor Thorne. “We lost 28,” she said and sobbed pitifully till the instant her eyes went great with the hopeless and overwhelming wonder of it, and her face moved slowly away into the pillow. “Oh why?” she begged. “Why? Why?”

  Eleanor pressed at the bare shoulder gently. “Please,” she said in a firm voice. “Please.”

  But grimacing, Miss Mintner knotted her tiny fist and struck it softly against the pillow. “Why?” she demanded, resolute but still tearful.

  Nurse Thorne sat down on the edge of the couch, gradually massaging Barbara’s shoulder. “Please—please don’t Barbara.” And it was the first time she had called Miss Mintner by her given name. “He was very old,” she added in real sympathy, fingering the tracery of near lace at her shoulder—the way the young girl was lying, twisted on the couch, the strap could have seemed to be cutting the circulation from her left arm.

  Miss Mintner slowly brought herself around to face Nurse Thorne. “If only you’d been here,” and at the point her voice filled with tribute there was the slightest reproach in her eyes.

  “I know, dear,” said Eleanor turning her look abstractly to where her own fingers kneaded beneath the binding filigree. “I was held up at Bullock’s.”

  Precisely then, on a chance glance at the window past Nurse Thorne, Babs Mintner gave a small start, raising one hand to her mouth, but as quickly uncovering a brave smile and one bare shoulder for Garcia, he who was standing there on the terrace, looking in.

  “What on earth!” cried Eleanor Thorne, following her. She sailed to the window, shouting. “Garcia!” exactly as if she had expected him to turn and run, run from where she hovered above him, actually speechless for the moment, as he frowning what under these circumstances could have been certain disapproval, stood quite still. Then she managed such outrage for him, hands on her hips, the accusation so glaring it might sear straight through his breast, burning past the heart of every last furtive mangled-tongue degenerate crouched, small matter how deep, in his rat-hole of lying guilt.

  “What IS this, Garcia! What are you DOING there!”

  But the gardener stared imperturbably past her to Babs Mintner, lying on the couch, smiling through tears.

  “Well, I have never!” said Nurse Thorne placing herself squarely before him so he could not see beyond.

  “You, Garcia! What does this mean?”

  “It’s for her,” said the gardener, obviously disturbed by the effort of speaking in English. He tried to look past Nurse Thorne by moving his head to the left and right, stepping forward and back, careful at the same time not to endanger the daffodils that grew at his feet.

  “What!”

  “It’s all right,” called Babs Mintner with noticeable effort from her couch, “it’s for me.” She began to get up, cautiously, swinging her white legs off the couch as if they were made of porcelain. “Yes, Garcia?” She came forward unsteadily, one hand to her brow.

  “You want to see him?” put in Nurse Thorne, incredulous. “Now? You don’t mean you want to see him now!”

  “Why, how do you mean?” said Babs, seeming really ingenuous.

  “But what on earth for?” the other demanded, freshly irate, actually blocking her way.

  “It’s all right,” repeated Babs, weakly, as if she might faint. “It will only take a minute.”

  “Well for heaven’s sake put on your whites!”

  Eleanor Thorne took the fresh habit from the chair and helped her into it.

  And Babs agreed wearily, romantically, as if the sweat and tears of twelve-hour bombardments had made the young nurse forget for a moment that she was a woman, beautiful and desired.

  So when the top button was done and the girl safely belted, Eleanor Thorne wheeled and left the room in a huff.

  “I’ll be having a word with your superiors soon,” Dr. Eichner was saying to Stockton and Eddy from the back seat of the patrol car en route to the station. “In light of that, perhaps you can realize it might be advantageous to you now to answer the question I put earlier: who reported this accident?”

  The two sat mute-skulled before him, Stockton drowned sullen and square-shouldered at the wheel, while Eddy, by the window, was propped so straight and stiff-kneed he could have just been handed a crumpet in the Commissioner’s living room.

  The Doctor went on, half patiently, “Since you obviously failed to get the truck . . .”

  “Why don’t you tell the Doctor who reported it?” Stockton broke in to Eddy, who began to move himself then, gradually, to face the Dr. Eichner.

  “Ain’t nobody reported it, Doc,” he said, turning completely around. “We seen the smoke.”

  Nurse Thorne went straight to her office, strictly stepping the distance, her close locked lips like the shutting edge of a knife. Once inside her door she half opened it in closing her eyes and, folding slightly at the shoulders, pressed back against the door as it gradually closed behind her both hands clutching the knob tight to a white-edged rose: but she was not alone. Beth Jackson—at the seaward window, moored as some great used ship, or listless bulk that moved in sighs—swayed at the ocean window, while all around her dark bunned head frayed a vigorous silver. She was the most unkempt woman in the Clinic.

  “Oh, there you are, Beth,” Eleanor Thorne improvised, going to the desk and taking up some papers.

  “It’s about that shipment of crocks,” said Beth, not to be taken in.

  It was almost a month now that a hospital supply salesman, in failing to find Nurse Thorne had called on Beth Jackson:

  A dark-rained Friday afternoon, when one shore-length cloud lay sucked at the sea like a huge gray leech in the western sky, and the whole ocean seemed to be moving slowly, inland. The young man had appeared casually, almost as if he knew that, failing to find Nurse Thorne, there was no reason to stay but in refuge.

  Here, in the outside room at gyno, curtains had been drawn against the day, and lights turned up—these lights, as hidden tubes that dealt from nowhere every corner with gentle searching light, did almost as sunlight passing paper screens faintly tinted blue: and the
illusion of permitting no shadow gave a soft uncertain swiftness to the room.

  The young man sat with his hands, which seemed not to move unnecessarily, turned palms up, gathering, as it were, calm from the air; and the effect of this was the evident strength of stillness in his face and shoulders. Apparently he represented an unknown house, one with which the Clinic had never taken account.

  Beth Jackson had given him a cup of hot coffee, with a dram or so medicinal rum in it, and had drawn off one for herself as she bade the young man sit to dry before an electric heater of the large, reflector type. In only a seersucker suit he was soaked to the skin, and when he half rose to hand her the catalogue, his smile at last breaking the stillness as though it were a book of comics for a grown child he handed her, his forward foot on the marble floor made a swamp-step squish that caused Beth Jackson to close the book on the very place he had opened it.

  “Gracious that won’t do,” she cried, and was up to fetch a heavy towel from an open cupboard near. “Now give them a good rub,” she, at her most bluff humor, “or else you’ll be staying on here as a patient!”

  She sat down opposite, bent forward for the moment with her outstretched fingers in touching adjustments to the spanning tilt of red copper between them, properly set as now to mirror and cup the glittered heat in a swirl at its center-source where it cast edgewise out in diffusion one flat, elemental image of the burning coils, which were yet, themselves, as the source, small, diversely-sized, and of a wire-like complexity.

  “Dr. Hauptman will have him one salesman less, and one patient more!” she revised, jovial now, settling in comfort with the balanced phrase that, too, may have represented a joke, since Dr. Hauptman had been dead for years. This was something the young man could not have known, though he did smile with her now, and shyly enough to encourage her bluff.

  “Oh yes, it’s very funny, isn’t it?” as she pretended to admonish him, while not wanting anything really ever to be other than funny between them. “It’s all very funny to you young people while you’ve got your health, but wait till the doctor starts dropping by twice an hour with a needle for you then you change your tune, believe me, I’ve seen it too often.” And her dart-round eyes, caught up as they were in the wide day-gray of his own, narrowed to serious as she finished, thinking certainly of treatments given there in her own department.

  “Doctor Hauptman, you mean?” said the young man, more than half in his innocence.

  And this had almost floored her. Yet, first it simply set her agape, aback the flat moon face as clawed by one terribly thin lightning frown, caught for the instant stark between two lights. But the good faith of the young man was above question, so then she just broke up, laughing.

  It began, this laugh, as one of those laughs that are real: rumbling down in the pit of herself—as if where swarmed a myriad globule things through the dark glistening confusion had touched two such liquid drops uniquely in this chance in ten million to burst back reacting, billowed out, unending, roll upon unchained roll: while each, as a brief deep centered chortle, spun unrising there in fixed revolution, was thrown and sprang plant-like outward, in claiming out, through red-faced tearfulness to double her gasping forward on the chair in the farthest tips of her person and back again, its bulk-shuddering reverberations.

  “Dr. Hauptman and his needle,” said the young man, playing it out, hiding his face in feigned alarm. “Look out!”

  “Yes, yes,” she cried, breathless, giving up, waving him off with her hand. “Oh yes!” It was too much. “Dr. Hauptman’s needle!” she repeated, falsely having heard. “Yes, oh dear, oh God!”

  After a point, however, it was no longer a genuine laugh but some unnerved noise of control as she forcibly seized the rhythm of the laugh and propelled it, in the illusion of riding it out; as if that dead laugh were this same laugh dying; or yet, again, as how past the brief wildness of unreined flats, horses slow and mounted men gain control at last beginning to ride, but do know then, in their heart of hearts, that the race is over. Nor could this sustain but follow the laugh with its nerve ripped out into wiping eyes and the wag of her great gray head.

  “Dear, oh dear, oh gracious,” and the scold of her red eyes on him for some indescribable mischief lead into a silence where they both sat easily, he in his blamelessness, she in her inexasperate patience. Yet out of this silence, like the circular rise of a great winged bird: not as a threat but a guidance, swept the dulcet beat of crumpling rain in the hush-cloth stucco of the outside wall; and again, even as falsely quick or near on wind-sung darts at the curtained glass.

  “Not that we don’t have more than we can handle as it is,” she began knowingly, in an effort to be sensible, touching her disheveled bun, “with a waiting-list in some departments at that, gracious knows!” And shaking her head twice slowly, she took to the catalogue, but could not resume it wholly until the young man actually leaned over and began really then to remove his shoes.

  “Well, now,” she started turning the pages, settling again with deliberate interest and understanding, some dear and unread mother first to hear the long unpublished poem of her son.

  “Now these are nice,” she would say, raising with her look a certain acknowledgment for the young man, “these aluminum Serve-Alls on page 29.” She lowered her voice in sudden confidence, even to half closing the book. “I’ll tell you what: I’m just going to make a note of some of these things, and I’ll see Eleanor Thorne the minute she’s back!” and before the young man could alter his smile, she had tried to withdraw all but the gesture, reaching out to touch his arm. “You see now we’re with Aldridge and National Hospital, we have been for years. What they don’t have they seem to manage for when we need it.” She took her hand from him in a sweep toward the mars-man array of chrome apparatus bearing from the next room. “These are all Nationals,” she said, turning on her chair, “except this one,” toward a lone thin case in the room, holding, as it did one silver spider of machine, so intricate and whole as to appear rightly sufficient in itself alone behind the shimmering glass. They looked on it briefly, almost without hope, as if its implications could never be really taken in at all.

  “It’s a Maidestone,” she said brightly enough, “an original. Dr. Maidestone designed it, and it was set up by Talbots. Dr. Maidestone. He was head of the department for years, a brilliant man. He’s dead now, he died in 1943.”

  At the slightest waver in the young man’s smile and a tilt of his head, she went on at once. “All our small-ray therapy, of course, is Aldridge.” The young man nodded, and Nurse Jackson closed the book completely.

  “Oh, I was in purchasing,” she said, almost darkly, yet allowed him his smile. “That was ten years ago.”

  Actually it was thirteen years ago, just to that very day, that the Clinic had centralized its buying, Previously, the twelve various departments of the Clinic had received the salesmen, seen their catalogues of ware, and through these salesmen had given their orders—to suppliers who were paid later by the administrator, Mr. Rogers, upon presentation of their bills at his office. Then, the departments were in turn responsible for submitting their invoices, and tallying in on their departmental allowances—to Mr. Rogers, whose burden, it must be said, was even at that point particularly felt, since the Clinic might have accounts with as many as thirty-seven different firms at once, the invoices continually being forgot or misplaced by the departments, and their allowance overstepped, padded or whatnot—and especially felt, since he, Mr. Rogers, must report quarterly to the board, a group of public-spirited businessmen who had, in the early days, lent Dr. Hauptman a great deal of money. And subsequent to the extension of certain government health programs, of discount and subsidy, to include such private institutions as this Clinic, the pressure of the board, on Mr. Rogers in his confused relationship with departmental spending had caused that poor man’s mind, as it was, one evening before the board, being layed open layer by layer, to flip. So that he had to spend two months in a rest-home i
n Arizona. And it was during his absence that there developed the practice of centralized buying, through a sole agent, which as it happened, was the newly appointed head nurse, Eleanor Thorne. Now the procedure was established that a department would make known its needs by memorandum to Nurse Thorne’s office, which would first record it against the department’s quarterly allowance, then place an order with Aldridge or National Hospital, two of the largest hospital supply houses in the world. The resultant shipment would be received by this same general office, opened, the invoice removed, re-checked on the department’s allowance sheet, and finally carried, invoice and package, by Albert, the ward-boy, around to the department concerned, where the invoice, hardly leaving Albert’s hand for the purpose, was initialed by that department-head, and delivered on to the administrator, Mr. Rogers’ office.

  This procedure was practice, not policy, since it had never been formally revealed to the board. And while it was yet within the prerogative of individual department-heads to order independently of Nurse Thorne, there had been, of such, only a few, isolated cases during the past 13 years.

  “Oh we can do better than that now I’m sure,” Beth Jackson was saying to the young man, for he was only blotting. “The circulation,” she said indistinctly, and next was on her knees giving his feet and ankles a vigorous rub. When they were quite, possibly painfully, red, she swaddled the heavy towel there and raised her eyes to his own. “There now!” she exclaimed with too much finality if she were to remain an instant longer on her knees. “This is pneumonia weather,” she promised in retreat, “whether you know it or not!”

  He nodded, laughing softly out of politeness, he who could have been as young as the boy she had lost in the war. So she half rose, leaving the towel gathered in warmth around his feet, and herself to turn away holding two small socks in her hand, which she gave a squeeze—not exactly perfunctory, standing bent above the electric-heater, alone, but a squeeze too gentle really for the one drop that fell and broke the image, that glittered incurvation as held her own twice wrought face in burning image, broken there, in reflection, at the cheek by the sizzling thin-arc of one, so natural, breaking drop. And she hung these socks on the edge of his chair, toward the electric heater, to dry.