Ruth had allowed Albert into the women’s quarters to help Estelle pack, in part because she hoped that with his best friend leaving, he would be more inclined to follow after her.
“Estelle, my beauty, go share that voice of yours with the world.” He gave her a gentle hug.
“Oh yes, I’ll be singing!” Estelle giggled. “Just, now it will be at my new job at the school. I’ll miss you, Albie!” She smiled easily as he walked with her and Ruth to the end of the corridor and then turned left, back toward the men’s wing, while they turned right, to meet Estelle’s father in the front hall.
“I don’t know how to say goodbye.” Estelle fidgeted. She seemed anxious to get the farewell over with and go back to the world.
“You don’t need to. You can come back and visit me. I am very proud of you.”
Saying goodbye to patients healthy enough to be released was one of the pure joys of Ruth’s work, and thanks to lobotomy, she was having more of these moments. She understood that she was not sending her patients home the same as they were before. Estelle’s speech was less sophisticated than it had been before the procedure, and sometimes she had a bit of a twitch, but she could function outside of a hospital. Be with her father. Have a regular life. It was a triumph.
Ruth would genuinely miss Estelle. She had been a challenging patient at first. So capable and lucid at times, and then suddenly deteriorating into moments of unexpected violence. Like that fork incident, which had not happened the day before her lobotomy, in spite of what Robert told the press. Sometimes he was like a carnival barker embellishing and creating drama to intensify his impact. Still, Ruth couldn’t deny that since her lobotomy, Estelle had been just wonderful. Placid, even-tempered, happy. Ruth could see that she had surely been a good nurse at one time. She didn’t have the mental capacity for that kind of work anymore, but the Veterans Administration had helped her secure a job as a music teacher at a small school, and she would be well suited to that.
“Mr. Lennox, we are quite sad to say goodbye to your delightful daughter. But we are overjoyed to be able to return her to you.”
“Mrs. Apter, I don’t know how to thank you.” He shook Ruth’s hand a bit too long, overcome with emotion.
“There is no need, sir. This is my job. Anyway, Estelle’s health is more than enough thanks for me.”
“For all of us. I just can’t believe it. I have my girl back.” He turned to his daughter and she embraced him.
“Let’s go, Dad. I wanna see my room and my bed. And I’m hungry.”
Ruth laughed. “Estelle, stay in touch with us! And, please, do let us know how she is doing,” she said to Mr. Lennox as she handed him his daughter’s few belongings. “We wish you all the best of luck.”
“We don’t need luck. We have you.” He smiled. “C’mon, Stelle, let’s go home!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Ruth shut the door to her office and sat down next to Susie in the other Barcelona chair. She had been running Emeraldine for eighteen months now, and Robert had finally convinced her to redecorate Charles’s office to both make it feel like her own and give it a more modern aesthetic. She would have happily stayed in her old office, but she knew it would have set the wrong tone with Roy Haddington, her assistant superintendent, to put him in the larger corner office. As a female in charge, she needed to do everything she could to ensure that others recognized her authority. Unfortunately, as she sat down with Susie to look over the inconsistencies in the annual budget, she worried she hadn’t done enough.
“I’m going to tell it to you straight, Raffey, this looks bad.”
“So, I’m not wrong?”
“Well, I don’t work with budgets of this scale at my little women’s health organization, but an increase in spending of twenty-five percent? I’d lose my job over that.”