“My new abs will not be for men,” she said before she slipped from the room with a wink, her laptop tucked under an arm. “They will be for me.”

Cricket had been only marginally accurate. The boxes did contain some of my old history and poli-sci textbooks, but mostly they housed my father’s yellowed photographs from college and early adulthood, some Princeton yearbooks, and seemingly the entire cannon of Shakespeare’s tragedies, all in soft paperbacks printed before 1970. Gregory Richardson had written his name in pencil on the inside covers of many of them, as well as the address of his eating club, where he could be found if the book were lost. Underneath his name, he’d written, President, Undergrad Student Assoc.

I wasn’t sure what to do with these relics, so I called Cricket back. She crouched next to me. “He took a class with a famous professor about Shakespeare,” she said. “It was the semester I met him.”

“He never seemed like a Shakespeare fan,” I said.

“I think he wanted to believe he’d be good at it.” Cricket put her wineglass down on the old parquet floor and leafed through a copy of Richard II. “No notes in the margins.” She smiled weakly. “Not surprising one bit. He wasn’t so interested in subjects that didn’t come easy for him. I wonder why he kept them. Maybe he had plans to read them, eventually. He had so many plans, I couldn’t keep track.”

Before she went back to the living room and her laptop, I asked what I should do with the books. Over her shoulder, she said, “You might ask Wallis. She loves The Bard.”

I turned back to the boxes, all the stuff from a part of my father’s life when he’d demonstrably done good. He whipped the votes to allow women as members of his eating club, mobilized antiwar protests, marched for civil rights. Over the decades, he’d worn these actions like a cape, and they’d made him appear noble to most of the public. To me. But the rot from the last years of Gregory’s life had spread, and I was finding it hard to keep the good he did from being spoiled.