The barber will put his scissors down on Wednesday afternoon and prepare to cross himself.
He will peer out past the house plants against the window of his shop, out into a cold afternoon. The trees will be bare with only a few dark leaves clinging, cupped like small hands.
The barber, Jerry Dee, is a middle-age man. The former altar boy now looks nothing like the large faded photograph behind the white sink showing him as a 12-year-old in vestments at the old St. Roman Church on the West Side.
Like thousands of others on Wednesday, he will be waiting for the body of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin to be carried past in a procession from Holy Name Cathedral to burial at Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Hillside.
“The last one we had, Cardinal Cody, he took the expressway out to the cemetery, that was his style,” said Dee, whose sign outside his Forest Park shop announces him as an expert in crew cuts.
“But Bernardin, he’s going through all the neighborhoods. Cody was a politician, a money guy. Always in the limo with the other politicians. Bernardin’s hearse is going past all of us. That’s the man he was. He was one of us. We’ll have a small memorial for him right here, as he goes.”
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In the last public ritual for the man who publicly embraced his death, the hearse and about 100 cars in a procession will cross dozens of city neighborhoods and suburban towns en route to the cemetery.
It will move past the squat union halls, ghettos and peaceful city park lagoons, small storefront Missionary Baptist chapels with faded, hand-painted signs and great stone Catholic churches and Catholic schools abandoned to black Protestants as the Catholics moved west.
The procession tells a story of Chicago, its neighborhoods and religion–the way things have changed, the things that do not change.
From the Roman Catholic cathedral on the Near North Side it will wind through downtown streets, past men in rich Italian suits and homeless women holding cups begging quarters, then past the tourists in the Park Hyatt Hotel lobby sipping coffee and martinis, beyond the Nike shoes shrine on Michigan Avenue and the luxury shopping meccas.
Then out along Randolph Street beyond Canal Street, under the viaduct at Canal with the Marlboro sign showing vigorous cigarette cowboys, dodging the potholes there and farther on, the hearse rolling on smooth and broken streets for miles.
It will go through a Near West Side that is reshaping itself, continuing to push more of the poor out. And then the larger West Side of broken windows, junk cars in the vacant lots, men in the streets, old women hobbling, their legs wrapped in beige elastic bandages.
Through celebrated and integrated Oak Park, past a local theater production of Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest,” past gas stations and Arab fast-food restaurants and a long, tall, red brick wall protecting the children of the Oak Park-River Forest Day School from Harlem Avenue traffic.
Then past Jerry Dee’s shop and into River Forest, a village of broad lawns and immaculate homes.
And farther on, in Bellwood, it will pass the Christian Unity Church, a tired red colonial building starting to lean with age. It offers an unrelenting message from the sign out front:
“Now is the time. Now is the time.”
The procession will push through the blue-collar suburban towns, where retired factory workers walk bow-legged in their pressed dungarees on the gravelly side of Butterfield Road, their heavy black work shoes polished, their baseball caps on square.
On those curbs, along Randolph Street and Washington Boulevard for miles, people will stand and say goodbye to the man who perhaps had less raw power than his predecessor, Cardinal John Cody, but more finesse.
There will be children and devout worshipers, and Greek butchers in their soiled white coats along the Randolph Street market area, and Generation X skeptics.
They will look at the black sedans and the limousines driving slow, at the politicians in the back seats, at Mayor Richard Daley and the other Irish Catholic Democrats, men who are privately worried that the next cardinal will push them to take a stand on abortion where Bernardin did not.
And they will pass priests and nuns and Roman Catholic lay ministers, praying, lips moving, but thinking about the future too.
Several of the older priests in the old churches along the route say they are wondering whether a strongly traditional successor to Bernardin will help stop the bleeding of younger Catholics converting to the Eastern Orthodox faith and other churches.
Meanwhile, the younger eucharistic lay ministers–like Liz Becnel at St. Martin de Porres in the 5100 block of West Washington–are hoping that they can keep their gains, and the ability to serve communion, despite messages from Rome and the coming change.
“We loved Cardinal Bernardin,” said Becnel.
A few blocks to the west lives Flora Polk, of the Austin neighborhood, who is not Catholic but plans to stand there on Washington and bow her head when Bernardin passes.
Polk moved to Chicago from Tuscumbia, Ala., in 1952 and roomed for a while with a black Catholic family. A Baptist, she has a white statue of the Virgin Mary in her yard next to her red brick house.
“I never heard of Catholics until I came up here,” said Polk. She said she especially admires the sacredness of the Virgin Mary. “I have always liked the Virgin Mary, the (saying) hail Mary, full of grace.”
From Austin, west through Oak Park, home to four Catholic parishes, where on Wednesday parishioners and students from St. Edmund’s school on Oak Park Avenue will walk several blocks to the procession route.
Past Oak Park, Forest Park and River Forest, the Des Plaines River is a dividing line, a savanna of old oak trees leading down to the river riding low along 15 feet of packed mud banks.
If there is any sun on Wednesday, it will slant past those black branches through the smoky brush of the small river valley as the procession moves into an impoverished Maywood.
Several blocks away, the side of a red-brick building is tattooed with the letters “MLD” and an upside-down pitchfork–the symbols of the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang.
“They were selling drugs all along Lake Street,” said Aurelio Diaz, 48, waiting Sunday for the Spanish-language mass at Maywood’s St. James Church.
Diaz, a church activist who works in real estate, moved to Maywood from the Mexican state of Durango two decades ago. He said most of the town’s Hispanics work in factories in Elk Grove Village, Franklin Park and other suburbs.
St. James parish is now about 75 percent Hispanic, he said.
“The white Catholics go to church in River Forest or Melrose Park,” said Diaz, standing only a short distance from a Spanish-language poster announcing the parish’s annual Thanksgiving Day dinner dance. “Their kids go to school there. They have family there.”
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From Maywood into Bellwood, Bernardin will be taken, past immaculate ranch homes in a predominantly African-American community where City Hall fines residents who let their lawns get shabby or fail to paint their screen doors.
The Poles and Italians who lived there have moved to Westchester and to Hillside, followed by African-Americans trying to escape Maywood and the West Side.
There, Butterfield Road extends Bernardin’s procession past miles of small businesses, apartments, the Kingdom Hall Jehovah’s Witness meeting hall, Pepe’s Hot Dogs, bicycle shops and storefront chiropractors.
Across Wolf Road is a strip mall, and a White Hen Pantry where Mary Hinz, an elderly woman in a blue babushka and horn-rimmed glasses worried about Wednesday’s crowd.
“I bet it will be packed, you won’t be able to turn on Wolf, people will be jammed around here,” said Hinz, looking past the cola and potato chip displays out to the street.
“I really liked him, but it’ll be too crowded to come, you know what I’m talking about,” she said.
From the corner of Butterfield and Wolf it’s only a few blocks south to Mt. Carmel Cemetery.
“I’m going to pay my last respects,” said Joan Dote, who is a nurse’s assistant and lives in an apartment complex across the street from the cemetery’s entrance. “He was just a very good cardinal.”
Inside the cemetery, the monuments are all grey stone, baroque.
Some have angels hovering on the corners of small mausoleums, and some are simple stones bearing names: Basta, Feroni, Osterflan, Ragno, Matoni and Quigley; Grandfather Luigi Porcaro, 1859-1936, and his wife, Maria, who outlived him by 19 years.
A tall marble woman clutches a marble cross, her face twisted in pain.
Another marker is a simple pair of wings. There are green plastic wreaths in front of some graves. Others have crosses on top of the curved head stones; the round edges and the straight perpendicular lines throwing shadows in the short grass, offering the quiet geometry of the dead.