Sitting in the waiting room

My father had surgery on his heel today. I spent most of the day in the hospital waiting room. Mostly I waited.

First I waited for the orthopedic surgeon to come and see me. The last half hour was the worst. I was fidgety, couldn't read my magazine (I'd brought The New York Review of Books, which isn't always the most engrossing publication), kept worrying that I'd missed the surgeon somehow.

After the surgeon came out to see me (with good news--he was OK, there were a few large fragments, and they were able to partially reconstruct the calcaneous and added screws and a plate), I waited for my father to get out of the recovery room. I waited another two and a half hours, reading articles on the Met's production of Lucia di Lammermoor and on the Mughal emperors of China, reading about Paul Krugman's conscience and an unorthodox history of economic development.

They finally assigned him a room, and I went up to it, where I waited for him to come up from recovery. Mostly I paced.

When I finally saw him, as they wheeled him down the hall and into the room he'd been assigned, he looked good, and I was glad that I'd been there, waiting. When the surgeon had come out to see me and deliver the news that the surgery went OK, I had given him my father's glasses and asked that he return the glasses to him. My father told me that when he woke up and realized that he could see, he also had known that I was waiting for him, and he had felt better knowing that I'd been there, waiting.

Q: Who killed Lily Bart?

A: Lily Bart.

Of course, that's never really been in doubt. But a new letter by Edith Wharton has reopened a controversy about whether her drug overdose at the end of The House of Mirth was an accident or deliberate.

I'll admit it's been a while since I read The House of Mirth, but I think it was always my feeling that Lily took her own life. There is her despair, and her careful ordering of all her belongings, the settling of all accounts. On the other hand, the language of the book is ambiguous, perhaps even slanting toward the accidental. The relevant passage is:

She had long since raised the dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so -- she remembered the chemist's warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred: the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure for her the rest she so desperately needed....

Now comes the evidence of a letter in Wharton's own hand, which seems to lean toward the deliberate. Of course, you can always argue the author changed her mind when the time came to kill Lily. As Wharton wrote to a physician acquaintance, "A friend of mine has made up her mind to commit suicide & has asked me to find out ... the most painless & least unpleasant method of effacing herself." She then reveals that she is actually asking on behalf of her protagonist:

I have heroine to get rid of, and want some points on the best way of disposing of her. ... What soporific, or nerve-calming drug, would a nervous and worried young lady in the smart set be likely to take to, & what would be its effects if deliberately taken with the intent to kill herself? I mean, how would she feel and look toward the end?

The letter seems to point pretty clearly toward suicide. However, as illuminating as this might be for an ambivalent passage, I do believe that the passage, and the book as a whole, can support both interpretations. And I have little patience with authors who go about making claims for their fictional characters outside the text. Once an author relinquishes control over a story, it becomes the property of its readers.

The turducken fascinates me

I just watched a cooking segment on a Spanish-language morning show in which the host and guest chef made a turducken. Fortunately, food and cooking is an area where I've retained most of the vocabulary I learned in high school, and I found it pretty easy to follow along.

I think it's official. Turduckens are everywhere. I don't totally get it (a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey?!), and I'm sure it's weird to eat, and probably easily messed up (overdone turkey, underdone chicken). But there's also something very imperial Rome about the whole thing, and it fascinates me.

Number four

Oakland is the fourth most dangerous city in the United States. We lost out to Detroit, St. Louis, and Flint, Mich. Not exactly something to be proud of.

Today -- the same day the rankings were announced -- a close friend and neighbor was mugged within a few blocks of her (and my) apartment. At noon. In what is regarded a 'nice neighborhood.' But then, Oakland is in the midst of a crime wave. Of course, I had no longer felt safe in my neighborhood after dark, but I did think it was pretty secure during the day. Ironically, another acquaintance had e-mailed her the article about Oakland's crime ranking before she took her walk this morning.

The mugging was unsuccessful, by which I mean my friend wasn't robbed. My friend, a tough city girl, was too angry to do the rational thing (give up her bag), and argued with the would-be mugger, even saying she was going to kill him. She says he was about 15, and threatened her with a gun that was probably just a fist in his pocket. She also says he hit her a couple times, but not that hard.

The mugging was successful, though, in scaring my friend. And in reminding all of us how vulnerable we are in the fourth most dangerous city.