Peggy: Wait. Please. Bette. Ms. Porter. I’m sorry. Please accept my sincerest apology. I didn’t mean to make assumptions. It’s just that I rarely come across young people with your kind of ambition and drive. Can we start again?

“We started again, and as they say the rest is history. She stayed at the gallery until closing time and believe it or not I ended up going back to her hotel room. She showed me all her fabulous art purchases that she’d made over the past several days and asked my opinion. We ordered room service for dinner and we drank a rum concoction that she was fond of and we talked for hours about art. You know how I get about art. She finally begged off in the early morning hours and told me I had exhausted her.

That was the beginning and for almost ten years we worked together to build one of the most invaluable and extensive private collections in existence. She would let me know what she was looking for or I would suggest something to her. Sometimes we had to make pretty quick decisions, so I had her private number. I could reach her anywhere in the world at any time.

When I met Peggy, I never would have imagined that she and I would have bonded like we did or lasted this long. With my mother gone I never really experienced maternal love in my adult live but for some reason Peggy Peabody always made me feel like I hoped I would have felt with my own mother. She always praised me and made me feel so good about my accomplishments. When I talked of my ambitions, or when I succeeded in getting some rare photograph or some other art object that she wanted she was always so proud of me. She was loving and generous to me in monetary as well as emotional ways. I felt loved like a daughter and she referred to me as such.

She was close to retiring by the time I sold the gallery and James and I started working at the CAC. That’s when I found out that she’d been one of the CAC’s benefactors for years. They’d received the Peabody grant every year for the past 20 like clockwork. We hardly even had to submit anything. You could imagine my shock when we didn’t get it the year, I became the Director, but of course at the time I didn’t know that she’d turned everything over to Helena. Once she retired, Peggy shut off the business world and traveled extensively. I didn’t see much of her for the next few years, but I always knew how to contact her if I needed anything. I suffered so much back then and all I needed to do was pick up the phone and call Peggy. She would have put a stop to it.”