She went and fetched her hand mirror, along with a glass of water. “It’s temporary,” she said. “It’ll get better.”

Nothing was left of my long dark hair except a rough fringe below the bandages, but I’d already felt that with my hand; my hair would grow back. The black circles around my eyes would disappear, the nicks in my eyebrows would fill in, the scabs on my eyelids would vanish. The long row of black stitches crossing the raised red flesh on my chin, through the corner of my mouth, over my cheek and cheekbone and into my temple—that would leave a scar. And where the stitches disappeared, under the edge of the bandage, I had no hair at all.

“Don’t cry,” my mother said.

I wasn’t crying; the tears were from the glare. I turned my head, inspecting the damage. Some would improve, some wouldn’t: I was alive. I had been pleasant-looking, unremarkable. Now I was different. I put the mirror down and feasted my eyes on the view from the window.

Then on my aunt’s face, when she arrived; on my sisters and my father. The newspaper turned in my father’s hands. The steam rose from a chicken. Alice, beautiful Alice, braided Agnes’s hair, and at dusk the swallows gathered and darted, as if at a signal, into their nests. After everyone went to bed I stayed up for a long time, watching the moon on the trees and the shadows below. The next day I read a few pages of Aunt Henrietta’s gift and saw the wonderful maps with my own eyes. Amundsen had delayed until they reached Madeira telling his crew that they were not heading north, as he’d announced, but toward the opposite pole. It must be admitted that it was a big risk, he wrote, but there were so many risks that had to be taken at the time. From that I might have learned something about the timing of announcements.

WHEN I WAS a little girl, I saw dirigibles rise from unexpected places often enough to think that normal. Trudging up a snowy hill with my sled, I passed gleeful strangers running down with gliders and hoping to take off, and I saw the first crashes of the first aeroplanes. With my sisters and Aunt Henrietta and Constantine Boyd, I watched the June Bug rise from the bumpy field to claim the great prize. Reporters hung around then as well, eager to glimpse the newest models, always hoping to be the first to the site of an accident. Photographers made postcards out of the crashes, which drew more young flyers from France and Spain, Russia and Cuba, New Jersey and California. The boardinghouses were packed; the market stocked strange groceries; my father made boots for them. Everyone sought out the men at the flying school.