“So you fucked him on the bench in front of the sculpture?”

“No, we started hanging out, then dating, and it started to get serious.”

“And when did Gail come along?”

“Ash and I had been together from the fall of ’83, through most of ‘85 when I met her.  I had met his parents Thanksgiving and he met Melvin and Kit for Christmas the year before.  We were pretty serious and I was actually considering converting to Judaism because his parents wanted it.”

“Really?” Alice was very surprised by this.

“Yeah, we had discussed it.  I mean, neither of us were religious anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was giving up anything and it wouldn’t have changed our lives much.”

“No bacon, no ham.  More importantly, no shrimp, no clams, no oysters.”

“Ashton and his family ate pork every chance they got.  They kept a Kosher house, but not Kosher mouths.”  Bette laughed.  “I remember one summer we had pork ribs on their deck.  Mrs. Schwartz brought the food up through the garage, you know, not taking it in the house, out the back, and up the deck stairs.  She used a hose to rinse the meat, then marinated it in a disposable bowl, stuck it in the outside fridge and went on to tell me that they kept a Kosher kitchen and it was going to stay that way. 

“Well, I know you celebrated Christmas last year and you’re not Mrs. Ashton Schwartz, so cut to the chase.”

“I was working at Beinecke—that’s the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale.  I worked circulation and did shelving.  Anyway, this was around late September and I’m ordering my books on the cart to distribute when this woman comes up to the desk.”

“Gail?”  Alice drank.

“Yes.”  Bette also took a few more sips of her drink.  “Gail comes up and starts asking me some questions about a few books we might have…”  She recalled that day and the story as if it were a dream or happening to someone else.  It was a lifetime ago.  She had been both a different person and exactly who she had become.  She was twenty-one year old Bette Porter, not the administrator of a successful museum, but an intelligent college student with eyes trained on her future.  The story Bette began to tell Alice wasn’t filled with the detail of that time, but Bette remembered it well.

End Part Two