The Christmas Kid

Just the Facts, Ma’am

FACTS MCCARTHY KNEW EVERYTHING. He’d meet you in the street and ask which continent was the largest, and you’d hesitate, and he’d say triumphantly: “Asia! It’s seventeen million, one hundred and twenty-nine thousand square miles, twenty-nine point seven percent of the world’s land. You could look it up.” You’d light a cigarette and he’d tell you that the geographical center of the United States was near Castle Rock, South Dakota, and Gaborone was the capital of Botswana, and 116,708 Americans died in World War I.

“Who led the American League in home runs in 1911?” he asked one night in Farrell’s Bar in Brooklyn. “Don’t even try to answer. It was Franklin ‘Home Run’ Baker. But here’s the beauty part; how many did he hit?”

“Er…uh…thirty?”

“Eleven!” Facts McCarthy shouted. “He led the whole league with eleven home runs! Can you imagine? Look it up!”

Information was a kind of sickness for Facts, and the infection began in the sixth grade. That was when he discovered he could memorize entire chapters of geography books, most of the Latin Mass, great swatches of the Baltimore Catechism. In the Catholic school that Facts and I attended, such prodigies of memory were always rewarded, and Facts became an A student. As an A student, he was a kind of star, acknowledged to be superior, his memory overwhelming certain weaknesses in the essay form. Nobody had a happier childhood.

But later, when Facts left school and ventured into the real world, he swiftly discovered that his talent was not so universally acknowledged. The world did not, after all, usually give out grades; the world was more of an essay than a multiple-choice exercise, and Facts did not do well in the face of the world’s chilly indifference. Eventually he made his accommodation. He worked in the post office, and, in his spare time, devoted himself anew to the acquiring of information.

“Who ran with Tom Dewey on the 1944 Republican ticket?” he’d ask. “John W. Bricker! One of the all-time greats!”

The information would come in a great flow. The name of Richard Nixon’s wife is really Thelma; she picked up “Pat” from her father. The most common name in the United States is Smith, which belongs to 2,382,509 people, followed by Johnson. The birthstone for August is peridot. Savonarola was burned at the stake in Florence in 1498, the same year that Leonardo da Vinci finished The Last Supper in Milan. Babe Ruth was given the most bases on balls in major league history, 2,056 over twenty-two seasons, and the planet Jupiter has sixteen moons. Facts was almost always right, although a lot of bars had to buy almanacs and the Guinness Book of Records just to be certain. But as he moved from his twenties to his thirties and then into his forties, the mass of information became denser and more impacted. Running into Facts McCarthy was like running into a black hole.

Naturally, he lived alone.

“Women just don’t understand an intellectual like me,” Facts said modestly one winter night. “Women are emotional, intuitive, know what I mean? They don’t understand facts. They never let facts get in the way of their opinions. I mean, they’re nice to look at. But, hey, I’m not missing anything.”

This could be dismissed as a carryover into adult life of his weakness in the essay form. But it was more than that. The truth was that no woman would have him. In a bar it was easy to put up with a man who said hello by asking you the name of the largest glacier in the world. You can always leave a bar. But it isn’t so easy to leave a marriage.

And there was the added impediment of the Facts McCarthy Memorial Library. In the four-room flat that Facts kept after his mother died, every surface was covered with sources of information: all editions of every almanac, three different sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica (marked with yellow markers), an almost complete set of National Geographic, complete runs of Facts on File and Current Biography, sports, science, business and political yearbooks, and almost eight thousand other books, not one of which was a novel.

“Being me,” said Facts McCarthy, “is a full-time occupation.”

And then Mercedes Rodriguez moved into the flat downstairs with her widowed mother. Mercedes was a twenty-two-year-old blonde from the Dominican Republic, and when Facts saw her that first day, unloading a Chevy filled with household goods, he thought he had never seen anyone more beautiful. When he should have been studying the 1963 Information Please Almanac, he found himself watching her walk up the block to the grocery store. He mooned over her. He sighed a lot. In the bars he was even silent. And then he decided it was time to act. He had to talk to her, and one day, in the vestibule, they found themselves facing each other.

“Hi,” Facts said, with his great gift for small talk. “Do you know how many books there are in the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore?”

“What?”

“In 1978, there were two million, three hundred and seventy-five thousand, seven hundred and twenty-one. You could look it up.”

“What’d you say?” Mercedes asked, and laughed out loud.

This was obviously love at first sight. Two days later, Facts was sitting with her in Loew’s State in Times Square, blitzing her with information about past Academy Award winners. Later he took her to Coney Island, and he rolled on, and Mercedes listened, nodding, offering no resistance. On the weekend, with her mother as chaperone, and Facts as a tour guide, she visited his apartment. The mother sighed a lot, saying, “Ay, bendito,” fanning herself with an Editor & Publisher International Year Book. Facts left them in the former living room and went to the former kitchen to make coffee.

“¿Cómo se dice ‘loco’ en inglés?” the mother asked.

“Crazy,” Mercedes said.

“Ah, sí,” the mother said. “Crazy. Es Crazy. Este Irlandes es crazy.”

Yes, Mercedes said, the Irishman was crazy, but wasn’t he crazy like her father? Didn’t Papi sit in the house in Santo Domingo cutting articles out of newspapers, piling them up in closets, asking everybody questions about everything under the sun? Didn’t Papi know about baseball and ice-making machines and Indian gods and the Gulf Stream? Yes, her mother said, and he died young.

Facts came back from the kitchen with three cups of coffee.

“It’s an interesting place, the Dominican Republic,” he said. “Known by the Indians as Quisqueya, eighteen thousand, eight hundred and sixty-one square miles, population, about five million, four hundred and fifty thousand in 1980.” He sipped his coffee. Mercedes looked at him with glassy eyes. “The main rivers are the Yaque del Norte, the Haina, the Ozama, and the Yaque del Sur.” The mother squinted at him, impressed by the names of familiar places. “You got bauxite there, nickel, silver, and gold, and the average life expectancy is sixty-one years.…”

“Oh, Facts,” Mercedes sighed.

They didn’t see Facts around the bar much anymore, and there were rumors that he was memorizing the entire written work of Joseph Stalin. Someone saw him once, walking in the park with a pretty girl, but nobody could believe it. And then one day, the invitations came by mail, in English and Spanish, and we learned that Facts McCarthy was getting married to Mercedes Rodriguez. This was stunning news.

“Yeah, it’s absolutely true,” Facts said on the phone. “We’re tying the el knotto.”

He was not willing to surrender the library, but neither was Mercedes; they brought in a contractor who cut a hole in McCarthy’s floor into the Rodriguez apartment and connected them with a spiral staircase, giving the mother her own room and Facts a duplex. We all went to the wedding, and then Facts disappeared into the Brooklyn winter, his studies, and his marriage. I didn’t see him again until the spring. Then I came out of the subway one afternoon and saw him walking alongside the park with Mercedes. She was pregnant and obviously happy.

“Ola,” Mercedes said, smiling broadly. “Dígame, what’s the longest suspension bridge in the world? You never guess. The Humber! In Hull, England, four thousand, six hundred and twenty-six feet long.”

“You could look it up,” Facts said proudly.

“You could.”