Mystic pizza: how one parish transformed a family.

This is a story about teenagers and priests, but it contains nothing scandalous or malevolent. Rather, it tells how an influx of capital can transform the spirit of a household, and recounts how the Catholic Church has formed people for secular success. When my sister Cynthia got her job at the parish rectory, our family struck gold.

Our pastor hired Cynthia to be night secretary when she was thirteen. He must have recognized her executive potential and figured he could use it. His large rectory sat on a side street in Chicago, behind a church of the Romanesque style. At that time, the 1960s, the place housed five priests, a cook, and a housekeeper, and it hosted visiting clerics, the school handyman, and a gardener. "Sounds like a game of Clue," my mother said.

On her first day, Cynthia was given a stack of baptismal certificates and told to record them in a colossal ledger. Rather than look for a fountain pen, she used the red ball point that was rolling around in the desk drawer. From that mistake she learned the importance of asking questions and using the head on her shoulders--talents vital in any setting. Cynthia worked the five weeknights, all day Saturday, and during Mass hours on Sunday. Within a week, she was scheduling weddings, and the pastor had raised her pay to $1.65 an hour.

My sister never saved her money. She spent it all. On most evenings when she got home from work, Cynthia would call a restaurant, order pizza, and throw a party for my mother and the little kids. These late-night celebrations, fueled by cash and stories from the rectory, live in family memory as a symbol of how much fun we could all have together. The pizza parties defined our audacious capacity for play. Any family that skied or vacationed at the shore would, of course, recognize the hallowed aspect of reliable fun.

The pastor owned a boat that was docked at Lake Michigan's Belmont Harbor. He called it Cynthia. Whether or not this coincidence positioned my sister for advancement is not known, but she did manage to persuade him to hire her next three siblings. This purposeful Chicago-style nepotism secured a cash flow that kept the pizza parties going for more than seven years.

Our family always maintained a ritual of sitting down together for an early dinner. My father's delight in seeing meatloaf or beef stew on the table cemented that tradition. But late-night pizza sent the significance of dinner into eclipse, a reversal my mother welcomed. Years of culinary responsibility had begun to bore her, so she welcomed the diversion of being a guest in her own house. My father missed out on the parties. He worked a night schedule and had to leave the house just as the little kids were putting on their pajamas to wait for the delivery man. I never ate anything either. Preoccupied with high school and my boyfriend, I chose to exercise the bittersweet prerogative of the eldest to remain apart.

My parents watched with approval as a professional demeanor began to emerge in Cynthia. They thought positively of her rectory position, and both admired the pastor, a sentiment characteristic of the neighborhood. With his gray hair and gold spectacles, he had the bearing of a gentleman. His elegance impressed people. As pastor, he had a reassuring approach to the liturgical changes vexing some members of the parish and an unflinching position on the civil-rights issues roiling the city. The majority of parishioners seemed willing to accede to his moral authority, perhaps having heard that when he was young he had turned down a baseball contract with the White Sox to enter the seminary.

Cynthia got on well with the other priests. On Sunday mornings, she would sit at her desk in the rectory listening to the Masses over an intercom, and signal the curates when it was time for them to bolt to the church to give out Communion. Large families attended the Masses, so the pastor used to invite visiting priests to pitch in. For a while, we had an Oxford-educated Jesuit from India who would drive over from Loyola University. In those days, Chicago neighborhoods offered people few opportunities to hear mellifluous speech, so my father, a scholar at heart, made sure Cynthia informed him beforehand when the Jesuit would be saying Mass. "I think he sounds like Richard Burton," he said.

Although Cynthia did her schoolwork, its importance faded in the brightness of independence enjoyed by kids in that more innocent era. On Saturdays, she was kept busy answering the rectory doorbell. Next morning, she would slit open the collection envelopes so that two middle-aged men could take them downstairs to the Money Room. Cynthia ended each weeknight shift at 9:00 by locking the church. When she returned to the office to hang up the church key, the pastor, who wore a smoking jacket in the evening, would come downstairs to check his messages one last time. He told Cynthia he just wanted to make sure she was all right before he said good night. With that, the day was over.

After she walked home and ordered the pizza, Cynthia would sit down at the table and entertain my mother with rectory stories. She told of the housekeeper and the cook, and of their great enmity. The tiny chain-smoking Noreen, with a beehive higher than Priscilla Presley's, had come from a farm in Ireland. She loathed the old cook, who was not only English, but Protestant. When the cook retired, the pastor, in a fit of gospel charity, promoted Noreen to the kitchen. His decision ushered in an extended era of Saturday lunches at which cream of mushroom soup was the featured adhesive. Noreen put the taste of tin back into canned soup, long after the world had moved on to better things.

Eventually, Cynthia turned over her position to my brother. At fourteen, Patrick had an expansive personality, one built to collide with rectory decorum. My sisters accused him of dodging phone calls and of spending company time beating the youngest priest at chess--charges my brother denies to this day. With a family lifestyle to maintain, though, Patrick quickly chose the path of the entrepreneur. He started an ad hoc newsstand outside the church by getting my father to park our station wagon at the curb during Mass hours so that Patrick and his friends could stuff Chicago newspapers in the back seat and sell them out the rear window.

Patrick's buoyant spirit set the tone for our parties and made him maestro of the evenings. My best friend sometimes visited when her spirits needed lifting. "I loved the feeling of walking in the door," she told me later. "The house was dark except for the light over the kitchen table. Your mother and the kids would be eating and laughing, with Patrick teasing the girls about whose turn it was to greet the delivery man." For some reason, awkwardness about tipping, perhaps, no one ever wanted to answer the doorbell. But those guys knew our address by heart. Some of them would just screech up the driveway and hand over the warm cardboard box through the screen door on the side of the house without even getting out of their cars.

My sisters Felicia and Suzanne worked at the rectory during the mid 1970s, but by then, times had changed. Felicia never liked the job. Locking up the dark church gave her the creeps, and she was too bashful to decline the unpalatable lunches. Noreen handed her money one day and whispered, "Walk over to the Busy Bee and buy me some cancer sticks." Although unacquainted with the phrase, my sister purchased the cigarettes and found herself generously rewarded. She received the first in a series of tips so enormous that it took thirty years for her to realize that Noreen might not have understood the U.S. monetary system.

Suzanne started alongside another new employee the pastor had hired as housekeeper. This redhead came from the same town in Ireland as Noreen, and the two of them would go to the Irish dances that were held in Chicago on Friday nights. Before long, a handsome man discovered the redhead. He was nice, but Protestant. Could the two of them marry?

The women presented the theological tangle to Suzanne, who was expected to get the answer without letting the priests discover that the sinner was living under the rectory roof. Confident beyond her thirteen years, Suzanne took up the matter with the pastor. Later she confided to my mother--over pizza--that the pastor intended to invite the couple to meet with him. The marriage took place shortly afterward.

The pastor's reputation for kindness lasted to the end. His obituary referred to him as a peacemaker and a gentleman. It mentioned his promising baseball career and noted that he had no survivors. Cynthia saw him for the last time in the late 1980s. Hearing that she had become a retail executive, he paid a surprise visit to her store on Michigan Avenue. Wearing his customary burgundy scarf, he fit right in with the holiday crowd. He told Cynthia he had just stopped in to say Merry Christmas and make sure she was all right. With that, he said goodbye.

I cross a bridge in my mind when remembering these things. I see the family house that is gone now, and I recall the feeling inside it. We felt as if we owned the world. The money financed our crazy night life, and the church showed us how to get on in the world. Our father was still alive. I stand in a very different place now. On this side of the bridge, that particular feeling lives as memory, but not as reality. Since that time, each of us has learned the great lesson of life. We do not own the world. Be careful, in fact, or the world will own you.

I have always been close to my six younger sisters and brothers, but as the eldest, I still feel apart from them in many ways. Not long ago, I invited all of them to bring their families to my place for dinner. Twenty-five people milled around the kitchen and then sat talking at the table with my mother. I was preparing an enormous feast.

As the cooking became more complicated, I looked up from the artichokes and saw the younger of my two grown sons coming over to the stove. He smiled and put his arm around me. "Mom," he said, "Why are you going to so much trouble with dinner? This group just likes to have fun and eat something easy."

I looked into his eyes. I knew what he meant.

Diane Filbin is a freelance writer in Chicago.