My mother said, "I brought you home from the hospital and Belle immediately scooped you up. She fed you for the first couple months of your life."
That always seemed strange to people but my mother suffered profound depression during her pregnancy with me and was probably grateful for the help.
And so Belle became a loving, constant and nurturing presence until she moved away when I was twelve years old.
It was an unusual relationship. I was culturally Irish and went to Roman Catholic grammar school and Belle was a Jewish mother of extraordinarily pure yenta-ness. I had Catholic guilt in the morning and Jewish guilt in the afternoon, with the fabulous, zaftig, over-the-top Belle.
Probably in her late forties when I was born, she was a very, very curvy woman who wore a sturdy girdle every single day. She had her hair done weekly - and the style was always a varnished variation of a helmet or a swoopy-do like Marlo Thomas on "That Girl". And it was always a monochromatic, unnatural color - most often blue-black but sometimes platinum blond or red-orange.
Belle dressed in the height of 1960's style. Her devoted husband Hyam "Hy" Haims was a "shoe guy" - a wholesale shoe salesman whose customers ranged from cheap stores on Milwaukee Avenue to couture houses on Michigan Avenue. Belle had dozens of pairs of the best, most outrageous shoes to match tight, sequined dresses in electric blue or embroidered shantung shifts in emerald green. Between Hy's business and Belle's family every week brought another big party - a bar mitzvah, wedding or anniversary to dress for.
She was the daughter of the head of the Rabbis that certified Kosher butchers so Belle really was a Jewish princess. She was a smart and big woman and she would rock me so tightly between her gigantic reinforced torpedo breasts and rock me singing "ahh-ah, ahh-ah, bay-bu-lah".
Belle treated me like a person and we had long wonderful conversations about the neighborhood or who was on the Mike Douglas Show that day ("It looks like Totie Fields gained some weight").
When I was twelve she and her husband moved away. There was a flight of jews from Chicago's south side to the near north suburb of Skokie in 1976. The neo-nazi's had moved into Marquette Park (where ten years earlier, Reverend King was hit with a brick). It was a hateful time and things were uncomfortable. We pretended like it wasn't because of those crazies. Belle would say, "We're moving to our retirement home."
I missed her but she would come visit occasionally and we would talk on the phone. She came to graduations - always shiny and with strangulating hugs.
Belle died suddenly during gall bladder surgery, when I was away at college. I went to sit shiva and the funeral home but not to the graveside service. I've missed her.
This is a true story. Thirty years later - yesterday to be exact - I was riding my bike through Forest Park - a suburb adjacent to mine. One tree lined street led to the next and I soon ran into a fence surrounding a cemetery.
As I circled around to the front, along a busy highway I got a strange feeling. I suddenly remembered when I was nine or ten years old Belle took me on a long car ride. We went to a graveside and placed rocks on tombstones.
Now, I had this strange deja vu feeling that this was the cemetery. The entrance appeared and the sign for "Jewish Waldheim". I pulled my bike up alongside the office. I went inside and there was a very nice woman. I told her that I thought that someone I knew had family buried there. I gave her Belle's family name. The nice cemetery lady's computer was already turned off but she called out to a colleague. After they spent a couple minutes searching through files I was getting ready to leave. I was unlocking my bike outside when the office people called out, "Oh yes. Here's your lady friend."
It was amazing standing there with the autumn light and decades floating like flecks of dust in the air. The caretaker gave me a map of the funeral plots with Belle's "address" written in ball point and an "x" and I took off on my bike.
Finding her grave was a surreal experience. It took around forty minutes of walking through rows, pushing overgrown weeds aside. The late autumn sun was coming directly from the west, leaving long shadows from the monuments. When I found Belle and Hy I felt such a sense of warmth. My eyes burned but I didn't cry.
The wonderful thing about Jewish tombstones is the use of small porcelain transfer photographs, often with protective bronze covers. I lifted the cover and there was Belle, exactly as I remember her (see above). I cleared off her tombstone and that of her husband, Hyman Haims ("My daily greeting in the driveway between our houses was, "Hi, Hy!").
I found some pebbles which is the custom - you leave pebbles so that the deceased or other family members will know someone was there. I lined them up above her picture. Then I heard a voice in my head - as clear as a bell echoing across the cemetery, "You call those nice pebbles? That one looks like tile grout."
I chuckled to myself. She had a great sense of humor. I miss her. The effect she had on my life is impossible to measure.
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