Special topics in calamity physics - By Marisha Pessl Page 0,27

the school's shiny 2001-2004 admissions catalogue, breathlessly entitled Higher Learning, Higher Grounds, had been riding around in a box in the back of our Volvo (along with five copies of Federal Forum, Vol. 10, Issue 5, 1998, featuring Dad's essay, "Nâchtlich: Popular Myths of Freedom Fighting").

The catalogue featured the proverbial wound-up rhetoric drenched in adjectives, sunny photos filled with bushy autumn trees, teachers with the kind faces of mice and kids grinning as they strolled down the sidewalk holding big textbooks in their arms like roses. In the distance, looking on (and apparently bored stiff) sat a crowd of glum plum mountains, a sky in wistful blue. "Our facilities leave nothing to be desired," moaned p. 14, and sure, there were football fields so smooth they looked like linoleum, a cafeteria with bay windows and wrought-iron chandeliers, a monster athletic complex that resembled the Pentagon. A diminutive stone chapel did its best to hide from the massive Tudor buildings slouched all over the lawns, structures christened with names like Hanover Hall, Elton House, Barrow and Vauxhall, each sporting a façade that brought to mind early U.S. presidents: gray-topped, heavy brow, wooden teeth, mulish bearing.

The booklet also featured a delightfully eccentric blurb about Horatio Mills Gallway, a rags-to-riches paper industrialist who'd founded the school back in 1910, not in the name of altruistic principles like civic duty or the persistence of scholarship, but for a megalomaniacal desire to see Saint in front of his surname; establishing a private school proved to be the easiest way to achieve this.

My favorite section was "Where Have All the Gallwanians Gone?" which featured a proud blurb written by the Headmaster, Bill Havermeyer (a big old Robert Mitchum type), then went on to summarize the unparalleled achievements of Gallwanian alumni. Rather than the typical boasts of most puffed-up private schools—stratospheric SAT scores, the vast number of seniors who vaulted into the Ivy League—St. Gallway touted other, more extraordinary achievements: "We have the highest number of graduates in the country who go on to be revolutionary performance artists;. . . 7.27 percent of all Gallway graduates in the last fifty years have registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office; one out of every ten Gallway students becomes an inventor; . . .24.3 percent of all Gallwanians become published poets; 10 percent will study stage-makeup design; 1.2 percent puppetry;. . . 17.2 percent will reside in Florence at some point; 1.8 percent in Moscow; 0.2 percent in Taipei." "One out of every 2,031 Gallwanians gets into The Guinness Book of World Records. Wan Young, Class of 1982, holds the record for Longest Operatic Note Held . . ."

As Dad and I sped down the school's main road for the first time (the aptly named Horatio Way, a narrow drive that teased you through a forest of pin-thin pines before abandoning you at the center of campus), I found myself holding my breath, inexplicably awed. To our immediate left tumbled a lawn of Renoir green, which pitched and swelled so excitedly, it appeared as if it might float away had it not been for the oak trees nailing it to the ground ("The Commons," sang the catalogue, "a lawn expertly cultivated by our ingenious caretaker, Quasimodo, who some say is the original Gallwanian . .."). To our right, chunky and impassive, was Hanover Hall, poised to cross the Delaware under icy conditions. Beyond a square stone courtyard ringed with birch trees, sat an elegant auditorium of glass and steel, colossal yet chic: Love Auditorium.

Our intentions were strictly business. Dad and I had come, not only to take a campus tour with Admissions guru Mirtha Grazeley (an elderly woman in fuchsia silk who led us like an old moth in dazed zigzags across the grounds: "Eh, we haven't seen the art gallery have we? Oh dear, the cafeteria slipped my mind. And that horse weathervane on top of Elton, not sure if you remember, it appeared in Southern Architecture Monthly last year.") but also to ingratiate ourselves with the administrator in charge of translating the credits from my last school into the St. Gallway Grading System and hence, determining my class rank. Dad approached this task with the seriousness of Reagan approaching Gorbachev with the Nuclear Forces Treaty.

"Let me do the talking. You sit and look erudite."

Our target, Ms. Lacey Ronin-Smith, was tucked away in the Rapunzellike clock tower of Hanover. She was sinewy, salt voiced, and unequivocally dreary haired. Now in her late sixties, she'd served as St.