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The engravers were the second group of patrons to arrive each weekday afternoon when Pfaff’s, the rathskeller under the old hotel, opened for business. They took the seats vacated by curmudgeonly printers dashing out of the basement to jump horse-drawn omnibuses bound for Franklin Square downtown, where magazines such as Harper’s and Leslie’s were printed.


Young Thomas Nast arrived soon after, taking his customary seat under the sidewalks below Broadway, where the massive hogshead barrels were stored. Nast preferred one table in particular, not too close to the gaslight chandelier but not so far that the lamp’s meager yellow glow was blocked by the curves of the vaulted brick arches. He sipped his brew and sketched away, his pencil catching and preserving the forms of actors and actresses and stagehands and the penurious penny press scribes who began to fill Pfaff’s two underground rooms with their chatter.


The illustrator’s pencil circled back a couple times to the large figure sitting alone at one of the small tables in the front vault. From the rakish tilt of this man’s ridiculous hat and voluminous cape, Nast pegged the shadowy figure as none other than Ponder, the theater critic. Back to the wall, Ponder hunched over his notebook, eyes straining to peer through minuscule blue lenses. He was pushing sixty and three hundred pounds, and his opera cape draped him snugly.


Heavens, he made the scribe’s art seem so tortuous! A poser, wasn’t he? Had he not once bragged that he never had to actually see a Broadway show to know what he thought of it? Yes! All the great Ponder needed was the playbill to tell the world what he thought of the newest show or opera mounted at the Fellow’s or the Astor Place or, for that matter, the minstrel act at Niblo’s.


Similarly, Nast did not have to see Ponder to draw Ponder. You sketched the waiters whirling around him. You sketched the handsome, obsequious actor in his crisp tweeds, fawning over Ponder. Or later, the lissome lady in red bending to whisper into the great man’s ear. As Nast’s pencil danced, Ponder’s ponderousness alone threatened to fill the page.


When he was being honest with himself, Nast could admit to his own issues in that department. Why, his girlfriend, Sallie, called him Roly-Poly in their most intimate moments. And Nast had once drawn a cartoon of himself as a pig!


A plate of oysters and a bowl of turtle soup later, when Nast had occasion to turn his pencil back to the critic, he noticed that there was not much new to sketch. The pencil in the critic’s hand, his notebook, his hat, his cape, the bottle of Pfaff’s cheapest champagne, and the delicately etched coupe glass by Ponder’s wrist—all of it hadn’t moved in an hour.

It was just that way long after Nast departed, emerging from the cool basement into the humid summer heat to pay a call on Sallie before heading home to his mother on William Street.

And it was that way still when dear Pfaff raised the lamps in his back room and shooed the lingering night owls to the long table up front, the better to start cleaning the joint.


Night after night, these bohemians would leave poor Pfaff shaking his head. Always they were wanting to stay later. Always they cajoled him into keeping the tavern open just a little while longer. They drank, they ate, and then wheedled him to mark their charges on their tabs until Friday! It was madness to run a business this way. But the stolid German tapster did it, secretly fearing he that would be lost without the literary sort who had made his locale legendary throughout the nation.


And this fellow, in the corner by the barrel…
“Mr. Ponder,” Pfaff said, bowing curtly. “Soon I close… Mr. Ponder? Your champagne is not good? I see you do not drink—”


That’s when he spotted the blood.


The critic had been silenced at last.