Specifically, he was appointed to the police department, and assigned to the ninety-three-horse-strong mounted patrol, which had been formed just ten years previously. Officer Moffitt was on crowd-control duty on his horse when the City Hall was officially opened in 1901.
He had been a policeman four years when his father fell to his death from a wharf under construction into the Delaware River in 1903. He was at that time still living at home, and with his father gone, he had little choice but to continue to do so; there was not enough money to maintain two houses.
Nor did he take a wife, so long as his mother was alive, partly because of economics and partly because no woman would take him with his mother part of the bargain. Consequently, Charles Moffitt, Jr. married late in life, eighteen months after his mother had gone to her final reward.
He married a German Catholic woman, Gertrude Haffner, who some people said, although she was nearly twenty years younger than her husband, bore a remarkable resemblance to his mother, and certainly manifested the same kind of devout, strong-willed character.
He and Gertrude had two sons, John Xavier, born in 1924, and, as something of a surprise to both of them, Richard Charles, who came along eight years later in 1932.
Charles Moffitt was a sergeant when he retired from the mounted patrol of the police department in 1937 at the age of sixty. He lived to be seventy-two, despite at least two packages of cigarettes and at least two quarts of beer a day, finally passing of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1949. By then his son John was on the police force, and his son Richard about to graduate from high school.
Patricia Payne leaned her head against the wall and put her hand on the hook of the wall-mounted telephone, without realizing what she was doing.
A moment later, the phone rang again. Pat Payne handed the handset to Mrs. Newman.
"The Payne residence," Mrs. Newman said, and then a moment later: "I' m not sure if Mrs. Payne is at home. I will inquire."
She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.
"A gentleman who says he is Chief Inspector Coughlin of the Philadelphia Police Department," Mrs. Newman said.
Patricia Payne finished blowing her nose, and then reached for the telephone.
"Hello, Denny," Patricia Payne said. "I think I know why you're calling."
"Who called?"
"Who else? Mother Moffitt. She called out here and asked for Mrs. Moffitt, and told me Dutch is dead, and then she said I would be welcome at the funeral."
"I'm sorry, Patty," Dennis V. Coughlin said. "I'm not surprised, but I'm sorry."
She was trying not to cry and didn't reply.
"Patty, people would understand if you didn't go to the funeral," he said.
"Of course, I'll go to the funeral," Patricia Payne said, furiously. "And the wake. Dutch didn't think I'm a godless whore, and I don't think Jeannie does either."
"Nobody thinks that of you," he said, comfortingly. "Come on, Patty!"
"That old bitch does, and she lets me know it whenever she has the chance," she said.
Now Dennis V. Coughlin couldn't think of anything to say.
"I'm sorry, Denny," Patricia Payne said, contritely. "I shouldn't have said that. The poor woman has just lost her second, her remaining son."
Dennis V. Coughlin and John X. Moffitt had gone through the police academy together. Patricia Payne still had the photograph somewhere, of all those bright young men in their brand-new uniforms, intending to give it to Matt someday.
There was another photograph of John X. Moffitt around. It and his badge hung on a wall in the Roundhouse lobby. Under the photograph there was a now somewhat faded typewritten line that said "Sergeant John X. Moffitt, Killed in the Line of Duty, November 10, 1952."
Staff Sergeant John Moffitt, USMCR, had survived Inchon and the Yalu and come home only to be shot down in a West Philadelphia gas station, answering a silent burglar alarm.
They'd buried him in Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, following a high mass of requiem celebrated by the cardinal archbishop of Philadelphia at Saint Dominic's. Sergeant Dennis V. Coughlin had been one of the pallbearers. Three months later, John Xavier Moffitt's first, and only, child had been born, a son, christened Matthew Mark after his father's wishes, in Saint Dominic's.
"Patty?" Chief Inspector Coughlin asked. "You all right, dear?"
"I was thinking," she said, "of Johnny."
"It'll be on the TV at six," Denny Coughlin said. "Worst luck, there was a Channel 9 woman in the Waikiki Diner."
"Is that where it happened? Adiner? "
"On Roosevelt Boulevard. He walked up on a stick-up. There was two of them. Dutch got one of them, the one that shot him, a woman. Patty, what I'm saying is that I wouldn't like Matt to hear it over the TV. You say the word, and I'll go up there and tell him for you."
"You're a good man, Denny," Patricia said. "But no, I'll tell him."
"Whatever you say, dear."
"But would you do something else for me? If you don't want to, just say so."
"You tell me," he said.
"Meet me at Matt's fraternity house-"
"And be with you, sure," he interrupted.
"And go with me when I, when Matt and I, go see Jeannie."
"Sure," he said.
"I'll leave right now," she said. "It'll take me twenty-five, thirty minutes."
"I'll be waiting for you," Chief Inspector Coughlin said.
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-ahalf-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 amp; Payne was formed.