Flash and Filigree by Terry Southern Read Free Book Online Page A

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pages, settling again with deliberate interest and understanding, some dear and unread mother first to hear the long unpublished poem of her son.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