"What details? Naturally I remember them all perfectly. What do you want to know?" The sharpness was excusable; yet Callista wondered whether she truly regretted the cruelty of that blurted question. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 4--she had reread the play in the afternoon. A catalytic action, although it had been a seemingly random choice, a turning to Shakespeare for relief, illumination, distraction, and something more, in a time of trouble, as another might have turned to music, or physical exertion, or the warmth of a friend. Her thought still rang with it, reverberated, and she understood now that the choice had not been random at all: "_Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none._" "Your father was drunk, Callista, otherwise I don't suppose even he could have been so heedless as to leave that bottle where a child could knock it over. Is that what you wanted to know?" "No. That's only what you've told me before. Drunk?" "Of course." "It keeps coming back to me that his face was burning." "What?" "His face was burning. It was the malaria. Wasn't it? You've told me yourself, he brought that home from New Guinea, latent but never cured." "Oh, he had that, yes. A mild form." "Mother, malaria is not mild if it gives you recurrent fevers and collapse. I've read up on it. I had to, trying to understand." "You're very full of book knowledge, certainly." "I've found more truth in books than in people. A mild form--why, two years later he _died_ of it, didn't he?" "Now, my dear, your father died, and I think you know this perfectly well, of pneumonia. The doctor informed me that the malaria was at most a--a complicating factor. The pneumonia was induced by exposure, and that in turn was caused by his passing out, as they call it, on a January night, in a drunken stupor, on his way home from a bar." "A drunken stupor, or a blinding fever. I was seven; I remember hearing you answer the telephone--the hospital, I suppose it was, where they'd taken him. I'd been put to bed long before, but wasn't sleeping. You were having drinks or something with Cousin Trent, after Aunt Cora and Uncle Tom Winwood left. I even remember hearing Aunt Cora say good night, and then your voice going on a long time, to Cousin Trent. I don't suppose I heard many of the words, but I knew the tone, the one you always used when you were explaining Father's shortcomings." "Callista!"