On a hot summer day, Claire and Francis, hand in hand, maneuvered the traffic of pedestrians, beggars, and skateboarders of Union Square. He led her across the path, under the lush foliage, and to a row of benches.
“Here,” he said. “Look at this.” He bent down on one knee and pointed to a message carved in wood. Claire, will you marry me? -Francis

He did not tell his mother.

It was a busy year for twenty year old Francis. His great uncle and renowned German engineer, Willy Messerschmitt, had died and after the funeral mourning and the estate situation had been untangled, Francis’s mother inherited a large sum of money which allowed her to pursue treatment for an embarrassing condition. This would require moving to Shanghai.

“We can help her move, can’t we?” Claire asked.
Francis had made it a point to keep his fiancé and his mother as far apart as nine-thousand miles of mostly Atlantic Ocean. Besides the inconvenience of distance, he had another reason to postpone the meeting: she was, quite simply, completely insane.

His mother had suffered from a rare follicle condition and her hair had fallen out. When it grew back, thick and greasy in some areas, but patchy, so that her pink agitated scalp showed through, she simply lost it. She cried for months, and none of the doctors in Germany, Switzerland or Austria had a clue—the beauticians either.

At fourteen, when Francis brought his first girlfriend home to meet his mother--poor Lilly Schuer--his mother had exposed her gruesome self. After politely tasting her jagerschnitzel, the girl excused herself and bicycled home. “The inbred,” the woman muttered.

Francis held Claire’s hand and looked into her eyes with the same seriousness he had when he had proposed. “Just to warn you: my mother has a very serious illness--Well, I don’t mean it like that. She won’t die from it, but it’s rather gruesome.”

He could see in her eyes a sympathy and sense of concern for his mother, and not a supposition to grow angry.

“You haven’t said anything before,” she said. “What is it?”

“I don’t know the name, but it’s some rare disease of the hair.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said.

He told her about Lilly. “Suppose your baby-doll daughter has the same genetics?”

“Then, I suppose, we shall have to stop being so god damned vane.”