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
“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,
“Crazy,” Mercedes said.
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.
“You could look it up,” Facts said proudly.
“You could.”
DRUM AND KEEGAN, OLD now, steel-haired, their skins freckled, shirts too tight, sat together in the warm June sunshine on a bench across from the playground. Prospect Park smelled of new-mown grass. There was no breeze. Keegan smoked a cigarette and glanced at the newspaper on his knee. Drum watched young mothers pushing children on swings.
“I don’t even give a hill a beans what’s in the paper,” Keegan was saying. “I carry it around because you gotta have sumpthin’ to do. Or sit on. Old guy sits on a park bench nowadays, they think you’re a degenerate.”
“I know what you mean.”
