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Patricia hung up, and then dialed the number of Matt’s fraternity house. She told the kid who answered, and who said Matt was in class, to tell him that something important had come up and he was to wait for her there, period, no excuses, until she got there.
Then she went upstairs and stripped out of her skirt and sweater and put on a black slip and a black dress, and a simple strand of pearls. She looked at the telephone and considered calling her husband, and decided against it, although he would be hurt. Brewster Payne was a good man, and she didn’t want to run him up against Mother Moffitt if it could be avoided.
After ten months of widowhood, Patricia Stevens Moffitt had arranged with her sister Dorothy to care for the baby during the day and went to work as a typist, with the intention eventually of becoming a legal secretary, for the law firm of Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne, which occupied an entire floor in the Philadelphia Savings Fund Society Building on Market Street.
Two months after entering Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne’s employ, while pushing Matthew Mark Moffitt near the Franklin Institute in a stroller, Patricia Moffitt ran into Brewster Payne II, grandson of one of the founding partners, and son of a senior partner, who was then in his seventh year with the firm and about to be named a partner himself.
Young Mr. Brewster, as he was then known, was pushing a stroller himself, in which sat a two-year-old boy, and holding a four-and-a-half-year-old girl at the end of a leash, connected to a leather harness. They walked along together. Within the hour, she learned that Mrs. Brewster Payne II had eight months before skidded out of control coming down into Stroudsburg from their cabin in the Poconos, leaving him, as he put it, “in rather much the same position as yourself, Mrs. Moffitt.”
Patricia Stevens Moffitt and Brewster Payne II were united in matrimony three months later. The simple ceremony was performed by the Hon. J. Edward Davison, judge of the Court of Common Pleas in his chambers. Mr. Payne, Senior, did not attend the ceremony, although his wife did. Mr. Gerald Stevens, Patricia’s father, was there, but her mother was not.
There was no wedding trip, and the day after the wedding, Brewster Payne II resigned from Lowerie, Tant, Foster, Pedigill and Payne, although, through a bequest from his grandfather, he owned a substantial block of its common stock.
Shortly thereafter, the legal partnership of Mawson & Payne was formed.
John D. Mawson had been two years ahead of Brewster Payne II at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. They had been acquaintances but not friends. Mawson was a veteran (he had been an air corps captain, a fighter pilot) and Brew Payne had not been in the service. Further, Payne thought Mawson was a little pushy. It was Jack Mawson’s announced intention to become a professor of law at Pennsylvania, specializing in Constitutional law. Jack Mawson was not, as Brewster Payne II thought of it, the sort of fellow you cultivated.
Mawson had exchanged his air corps lapel pins for those of the judge advocate general’s corps reserve when he passed his bar examination, and three months later had gone off to the Korean War as a major. He had returned as Lieutenant Colonel J. Dunlop Mawson, with a war bride (a White Russian girl he had met in Tokyo) and slightly less lofty, if more practical, plans for the resumption of his civilian law practice.
He had earned the approval of his superiors in the army with his skill as a prosecutor of military offenders. He had liked what he had been doing, but was honest enough with himself to realize that his success was in large part due to the ineptitude of opposing counsel. Very often, he was very much aware that if he had been defending the accused, the accused would have walked out of the courtroom a free man.
Odette Mawson had already shown that she had expensive tastes, which ruled out his staying in the army. He would have been reduced in grade in the peacetime army to captain, and captains did not make much money. About, J. Dunlop Mawson thought, what a district attorney in Philadelphia made. District attorneys do not grow rich honestly.
That ruled out transferring his prosecutorial skills to civilian practice.
But it did not rule out a career in criminal law. While ordinary criminal lawyers, dealing as they generally do with the lower strata of society, seldom make large amounts of money, extraordinary criminal lawyers sometimes do. And they increase their earning potential as the socioeconomic class of their clientele rises. An attorney representing someone accused of embezzling two hundred thousand dollars from a bank can expect to be compensated for his services more generously than if he defended someone accused of stealing that much money from the same bank at the point of a gun.
When J. Dunlop Mawson, who had made it subtly if quickly plain that he liked to be addressed as “Colonel,” heard that Brewster Payne had had a falling-out with his father over his having married a Roman Catholic cop’s widow with a baby, a girl who had been a typist for the firm, he thought he saw in him the perfect partner.
First of all, of course, Brewster Payne II was a good lawyer, and he had acquired seven years’ experience with a law firm that was good as well as prestigious. And he was also Episcopal Academy and Princeton, Rose Tree Hunt Club and the Merion Country Club—without question a member of the Philadelphia Establishment.
Brewster Payne II was not a fool. He knew exactly what Jack Mawson wanted from him. And he had no desire whatever to practice criminal law. But Mawson’s arguments made sense. Times had changed. Perfectly respectable people were getting divorced. And the division of the property of the affluent that went with a divorce was worthy, in direct ratio to the value and complexity of the property involved, of the talents of a skilled trust and estate lawyer. He would handle the crooks, Jack Mawson told Brewster Payne, and Payne would handle the cuckolded.
Payne added one nonnegotiable caveat: Jack could handle anything from embezzlers to ax murderers, so long as they were, so to speak, amateurs. There would be no connection, however indirect, with Organized Crime. If they were to become partners, Payne would have to have the privilege of client rejection, and they had better write that down, so there would be no possibility of misunderstanding, down the pike.
Five months after Mawson & Payne opened offices for the practice of law in the First National Bank Building, across from the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel and the Union League on South Broad Street, Patricia Stevens Payne found herself with child.
Brew Payne, ever the lawyer, first asked if she was sure, and when she said there was no question, nodded his head as if she had just given him
the time of day.
“Well, then,” he said, “we’ll have to do something about Matthew.”
“I don’t know what you mean, honey,” Patricia said, uneasily.
“I’d planned to bring it up before,” he said. “But there hasn’t seemed to be the right moment. I don’t at all like the notion of his growing up with any question in his mind of not being one of us. What I would like to do, if you’re agreeable, is enter a plea for adoption. And if you’re agreeable, Patricia, to enter the appropriate pleas in your behalf with regard to Amelia and Foster.”
When she didn’t immediately respond, Brewster Payne misunderstood her silence for reluctance.
“Well, please don’t say no with any finality now,” he said. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to face the fact that both Amy and Foster do think of you as their mother.”
“Brewster,” Patricia said, finding her voice, “sometimes you’re a damned fool.”
“So I have been told,” he said. “As recently as this afternoon, by the colonel.”
“But you are warm and kind and I love you very much,” she said.
“I hear that sort of thing rather less than the other,” he said. “I take it you’re agreeable?”
