“It should have been such a lovely week in France,” I heard my mother say, later, to my father.

• • •

When my mother had been home for ten days, she went to see a wigmaker. She had investigated wigmakers as she would have investigated florists or caterers, as my father had investigated doctors, and she had found the names—so she believed—of the two best wigmakers in New York. She went to see them so she could order the wigs and have them in hand before her hair began to go. For my mother, the prospect of baldness was the worst of the punishments of chemotherapy. Internal suffering she could bear with equanimity, telling just what she chose to just whom she chose, willing herself to be brave in the face of it. But the external symptoms that could not be hidden were, to her, intolerable and humiliating. She was not so much shamed by the revolt of her body from within as by the damage that showed without. My mother was accustomed to the kinds of deference that her beauty had always won for her, and to have to give these up at the same moment that she confronted death seemed too unfair. To be a hairless woman was, for her, to be freakish and grotesque. My mother’s hair was heavy and soft and taffy-colored with occasional flashes of gold. It was always neat and clean and orderly; my mother did not ever have hair that curled where it should not have curled, or that frizzed, or that got tangled. I can remember sitting with her as a child and talking when we had just come in or were just about to go out, when she would run a brush over her hair. I remember how any hint of chaos gave way at once to her disciplined and regular strokes. I can remember, too, the rain through which we did not walk, the taxi windows we did not open, the windy paths we circumvented for the sake of my mother’s hair.

My mother had her hair done (it was her first time out of the house, after that first hospital visit), and then went directly to the wigmakers and ordered three wigs from each of them, so that they could copy exactly the appearance of her hair when it was freshly coiffed. My mother did not show any interest in getting a fun wig; she did not want to try new possibilities. My mother had spent some years negotiating the hairstyle that suited her; she had changed it when and as her age had demanded that she do so; and she was not going to change it again now. For the few weeks that her own hair was to last, she kept reaching up and touching it, patting it into place as though to memorize her own gestures and their effect for an unspecified future period. She arranged with her hairdresser to keep free her nine-thirty appointment on Mondays and Thursdays, so that she could take it up again when her hair came back, as all the doctors promised that it would. For the sake of my father and Freddy and me, my mother imagined such a time.