“I mean, what do you need with a car that smells, right? We’ll get another one.” He hadn’t smoked for four years, but he patted his shirt pocket, looking for cigarettes. “So how was school?” he said. “How’s everything going?”
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
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
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
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
“Being me,” said Facts McCarthy, “is a full-time occupation.”
