PART THREE
It is an unfortunate but well-disguised fact that from its founding in 1901 to the present day, Girls School's faculty has been far more colorful than distinguished. The first decade's worth of card-counting gamblers, crackpot inventors, sexologists, plagiarists and other grifters drawn to the easeful ways of academe created a permanent refuge for their kind in this ivied, scandal-shrouded sanctuary. Which is not to say that there have been no finely illuminating minds among the faculty--there have even been stars in residence at times. Babe wishes she were old enough to have studied with Raszcow, the exiled Pole who taught Comparative Religion in the late 1950's; she wishes not so much to have felt his official as his clandestine influence, which brought Girls School everlasting fame among followers of the world's underground press. Subversive comic books in black and white were Raszcow's passion and the cause of his exile, and the infamous Zombie Protestants serial, which he helped to write, draw, print and publish during his two-year stay put Girls School on the map for all serious thinkers, as Constance says during her Admissions tours. Many of the older girls worked with him in a secret studio in the basement of East Residence to create, among other immortal images, the aftermath of the church barbecue in the first number, "Zombie Methodists," the teeming hordes of cardigan sweater vests advancing upon the moonlit golf course in "Zombie Presbyterians," and the strangely moving necrophiliac oral baptisms of the climactic "Zombie Mormons." Like Constance, Babe would like to have been there, as they tumbled from the press, to smell, feel and fold the pulpy, ink-moist sheets of Zombie Protestants; instead, Constance has a rare complete eight-volume collection so brittle that the pages crack at any eager touch: Raszcow left Girls School for Hollywood the year Babe was born. Since his time there have been many interesting people on the faculty, but none with a temperament so naturally suited to inspire the talents of the East Residence girls. By the time they've achieved their transfer to Damnation most of them have established an idiosyncratic relationship with class attendance in any case; and while those who linger on, like Babe and Constance, now and then repeat a favorite course or audit a novelty (Constance has been sitting in occasionally on The History of Women's Hats, a new offering), for the most part they pursue their own studies and their own lives and regard the faculty as rather second-rate colleagues. Towards the administration of the school their attitude is more complex.

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