A Puzzle for fools Read Free Page A

happened to glance down at the bedroom slippers which Miss Brush had provided for me. There was nothing particularly unusual about them except that they were large and obviously male.
    Miss Brush, I knew, was the most efficient of young women. But it showed almost excessive efficiency to keep slippers in her bedroom against the chance visit of a neurotic male patient in bare feet.
    I might have tried to puzzle it out. But Doctor Lenz was speaking again.
    "Do not worry, Mr. Duluth. And remember that, if you see or hear anything out of the ordinary, that thing is real and has its basis in fact. Do not let anyone or anything persuade you that you are suffering under a delusion. Good night."

3
    I HAD NO OBJECTIONS now to going back with Warren. Of course, if I had been a little more, or a little less crazy, I might have thought that Lenz had been putting up an elaborate song and dance to get me interested in something . besides myself. But I didn't. Although I had been unable exactly to grasp his attitude toward it, I felt that he actually did believe strange things were going on in the place. Well, it was exciting; something to break the clinical monotony.
    Back in Wing Two, as the men's quarters were officially titled, Warren handed me over to the dour care of the night nurse, Mrs. Fogarty, who happened also to be his sister.
    Apart from the celestial Miss Brush, the staff on Wing Two was a family party and, according to rumor, not a particularly happy one. We patients spent hours of prurient speculation upon the complicated relationships which were worthy of Dostoyevsky or Julian Green.
    The angular Mrs. Fogarty was the wife of Jo Fogarty, our day attendant and, either by choice or by accident, their work shifts gave them practically no time together by day or night. Their union, if it was one at all, was obviously of the spirit. And Mrs. Fogarty, as though suffering from a sort of spinsterial hang-over, spent most of her time and her grim affection upon her brother.
    Incidentally, she was as plain as Miss Brush was pretty, presumably on the theory that we mental patients needed stimulation by day and sedation by night.
    Mrs. Fogarty greeted me with an antiseptically anxious smile and a rustle of starched cuffs. Owing to a slight hardness of hearing, she had cultivated the habit of never speaking herself when a facial expression or a gesture was sufficient to convey her meaning. A nod of the head indicated that I was to go back to my room, and together we started down the corridor.
    We had just reached my door when there was a scuffling sound in Laribee's room, next to mine. As we paused, old Laribee ran out into the corridor, his gray woolen pajamas flapping in unbuttoned abandon. His florid face was creased with fear. His eyes had that blank hopeless look which a few weeks in the sanitarium had made me know only too well. Dazedly he came up to us, clutching shakily for Mrs. Fogarty's large-boned hand.
    "Tell them to stop," he moaned. "I've tried not to give way. I tried to keep quiet. But they've got to stop."
    Mrs. Fogarty's equine face registered professional consolation, and then, as though sensing that the situation demanded words, she added mechanically: "It's all right, Mr. Laribee. No one's hurting you."
    "But they've got to stop." He was a tall, heavy man, and it was somehow shocking to see the tears rolling down his cheeks like a baby's. 'Tell them to stop the ticker. It's way behind the market. Stocks must be crashing. Don't you see? I'm ruined. Everything's going. The ticker—make the ticker stop."
    The night nurse's fingers gripped his firmly and she drew him back into his room. Through the wall I could hear him, quite hysterical now.
    "Put in a stop loss order on my Consolidated Trust— crashing—crashing."
    Mrs. Fogarty's answering voice was placid and reassuring. "Nonsense, Mr. Laribee. Stocks are all going up. Now you go to sleep and read about them in the paper tomorrow."
    At last she calmed him down. I