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

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 in 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.
    What was the most understandable upshot of this interlude was, in the end, Beth Jackson’s having placed an order with the young man for six crockery basins for her department. And this shipment had arrived at Nurse Thorne’s office. Not as an important package but as one unexpected, opening it became something like the days before centralized buying when opening the packages always held some suspended interest of the surprises at Christmas. But, what with the breach of policy this package represented, Nurse Thorne quite forgot to remove the invoice, or if she did remove it, forgot that she had done so, and above all, where she had put it—for it occurred to her three days later that she had made no entry on the