Glyphs

The Most Beautiful Suicide Evelyn McHale, May 1, 1947 86 floors up, the view from the Empire State Building Observation Deck shows a Legoland city. Brick atop brick.

Brick atop brick, concrete blocks wedged and plastered together–miles of it– and there you have the city, the cold, hard city, where Evelyn McHale breathed her last. Clouds are not much cushion for meteors or for determined jumpers.

A determined jumper, she dismissed her fiance’s proposal, wracked her brain for reasons, came to the dark conclusion that she was not, (a dark conclusion indeed), good wife material.

Evelyn left a short note saying no one should see her body. (Women! said one cop, after seeing her body. Always worrying about their looks.) Of course she was, we always are; never wishing our realness, the realness of our naked faces, on anyone.

Evelyn left her small brown makeup kit at the site of her jump, ever mindful that the site of her jump was windy, mindful of what stiff breezes and tears can do to mascara and lipstick. Her own mother, her own sad, quirky mother, had left them all– father, brothers and sisters, and her.

“Mental illness,” is what they said was the reason and, after hearing “mental illness, she kept 29