There was no way that we could transform the holiday into the sort that Freddy, Helen and I might have worked out for ourselves, because it was not that sort of holiday in any of its most fundamental components, and it was not subject to our regulation. We were staying in a château outside Saint-Paul de Vence, one of those places striking for its irreproachable lack of ostentation. We had rooms painted very white, almost monastic in their simplicity, except that they were always full of flowers, and our rooms shared a private lawn, which commanded a view across the valley and the town of Saint-Paul and on toward the sea. It was on this lawn that we had breakfast every morning, surrounded by the discreet sumptuousness that my mother loved so much.

We called home each day, and with each new test that was performed it seemed more and more likely that my mother was going to be fine. The suspense all led up to Thursday, when they would do the surgery. We spent Thursday at the scheduled museum, and then ate the scheduled lunch. It was one of those days when the weather was unduly heavy, like a tarpaulin over one’s senses, and I remember feeling exhausted and numb and anxious. Then, too, I was overwhelmed by that belief, which so often sets in at a moment of crisis, in one’s own ability to influence fate by dint of the pettiest of actions. So I ritualized every footstep, every bite of food, every breath, every remark, every passing image of desire. We ate lunch on the terrace of the restaurant, with the playing fountains, and wondered whether the rain would come. Then we drove back to the hotel, where a problem on the telephone lines made it very difficult to get through to America. Perhaps half an hour went by while we got recordings in French and recordings in English, and then finally we reached my father.

Only after he said that it was cancer did I realize how fundamentally I had persuaded myself that it would not be. My mother had a cancerous cyst in her abdomen, and the disease had spread into certain internal membranes. The tumor had been removed, along with various expendable bits of anatomy, but it was not possible to remove enough of my mother, and so chemotherapy was prescribed as the only way to deal with the spread of the disease, a spreading not of what is fittingly called gross tumor, but of tiny pinpoints of malignancy. We did not know how high the chances were that the cancer would be entirely eliminated. We were all stuck on the word “cancer,” as though its consonants and vowels were the razor spikes of a barbed-wire fence that ran between us and how we had been. It was a word too full of obvious drama, like a bad TV movie, like a modern version of grand opera—and my mother, musical though she was in general, hated grand opera. “All those maudlin women shrieking endlessly before they die,” she used to say. “So implausible and so tedious.” The chemotherapy was scheduled to occupy nine months, and we were told that it would make my mother very sick for a week or so each month when it was administered. We also learned that it would make her lose her hair.