“No, I’m sorry, I can’t.” Too late I saw I should have said, “I can’t tonight,” but the pressure of the immediate future when my mother should awaken made me unable to look further ahead into an evening when I might be free to drink beer. I think Nathan acted not out of embarrassment but at the command of a reflex when, before I had uttered the last word of my refusal, he put his hand to the left side of his face and leaned into the shade of the elm tree under which we stood. His unilateral smile of twisted lips and one bright, malicious eye measured the altitude of his anger whose heights he had instantaneously scaled. With his right hand he tipped an imaginary hat and said, “I beg your pardon, moddam. No offense intended, merely a case of mistaken identity.”

I started to explain to him why I could not go with him, but he raised his hand for silence. “No, really, I’m not in the least interested. I was under the impression that we had a tacit understanding, commonly known as ‘friendship,’ but I see I was wrong. It is just as well. Momentarily, under the influence of certain romantic symbols, I forgot that I must burn the midnight oil tonight over the misguided but well-meaning Thomas More. Please overlook my brief collapse.”

“Oh, Nathan!” I cried, hoping by the tender tone of my voice to convey my despair so that he would forgive me and I might then tell him about Mamma. But I did not achieve my aim. The long white fingers of his left hand stole downwards and revealed, bit by bit, his garish cheek. “It was all right in the fog where nobody could see you, wasn’t it? But it’s a horse of a different color—rather, to be more exact, a freak of a different color—in the clear public light of our respectable village bistro. Come off it, lovey, you call me Cranberry behind my back, don’t you?”

I was possessed by the deliberate unveiling of the birthmark and in a voice that came not from my conscious self but from the fanatical rapture with which I had secretly stared at it when I was ten years old, I said, “No, I love your birthmark.”

He had not expected me even to say the word, spoken perhaps for the first time in his presence since he was a child and was the target for his contemporaries’ downright jokes. My beastly declaration, a maudlin lie as he believed, brought a flush to the uncolored side of his face. As if confronting me with the tool of my crime to watch as my guilt blanched and shook me, he slowly turned his head so that his right profile was concealed by the trunk of the tree and from the dull ember which ran from his hair to his chin, the diabolical eye winked its purple lid. His limber lips were drawn to this side and from them issued a laugh in which mirth was not even pretended but which was the distance-muted entreaty of a wounded animal.