Singed Wings (a "Guest Entry")

The following account was written by my mother, Ruth Kurtz, at the time, for a college journal when she was in college, likely in the early '50's, though taking place in the 30's. A friend of mine alerted me to its existence recently. I had never seen it before. It is a true story, and I think it deserves a larger audience.

Singed Wings

Since the time when my mother would arouse me for my 2 a.m. feeding, I have always been lured by a fascination for night life. Perhaps it is the bright lights--a sort of moth-to-candle type of attraction; perhaps it is the half-feeling of festivity in the air; perhaps it is merely the fact that humanity looks better by lamplight.

At any rate it was that appetite for night life that prompted an older and a younger sister and me to crawl into the car with my father one Saturday night. His destination was only a few hundred yards away, the corner garage, where he was going for gasoline, but that garage constituted the center of Park View's night life; so we loved to go there.

When one traveled by car from my home to this particular garage, there was hardly time to shift into high gear before he was there, but the rubber finger of darkness had erased enough of the familiar features of the place that its charm was in no way lessened.

On the particular Saturday night of which I speak we coasted into the magic pool of light that encircled the front of the building, and, as always, the odor of gasoline, new tires, and grease met us intoxicatingly. Entranced, we rolled down the windows and hung out our smudgy little faces. (Our mother never bathed us until the very last thing Saturday night because we always got dirty again unless we were taken directly from tub to bed.) We waited while my father got out.

Suddenly something was not as it should be. The car had moved! In fact, it was still moving. We did not realize that my father had parked, without pulling the brake, against the car ahead of us, and that car now, within its own rights, was leaving. All we knew was that with uncanny certainty we were moving forward.

My older sister was in the front seat, and she, with amazing foresight, promptly scrambled out, slamming the door behind her. My younger sister and I were in the back seat, and, with the departure of Mary, the burden of the enterprise rested on me. Edith was petrified with terror. To move from that moving death trap cumbered by her was an obvious impossibility. To leave without her would be murderous; so I stayed.

One thing that I had learned during the seven or eight years of my life served me in good stead at this moment. I knew how to drive a car. All you had to do was to keep from running into the other cars on the road and you were all right. That should not be hard. I leaned across the back of the front seat and seized the wheel.

My last glimpse of Mary showed her by the gasoline pumps holding her ears to shut out the inevitable crash with which runaway cars always terminate their short careers. Then with a hearselike lurch, our old Peerless swayed out into the road and was off.

I wanted to hold my ears too, but that would never do. There was an immense curve just ahead. Somehow we made it and continued on. I wondered for a second why I couldn't see the road. It was terrifically dark. The only time I was absolutely certain whether or not we were on the road at all was when another car shot by, with a superior flirt of its headlights.

After a time I remembered that people usually drove cars from the front seat; so I slowly wormed my way over the back into the place behind the wheel.

Edith was sniffling in the back seat. I wished she would stop it. I wanted to do the same thing, but we both couldn't; so I tried to act brave.

"What are we going to do?" she whimpered, between sniffs.


"Don't be afraid. They'll come after us." I lied. I knew they couldn't come after us. Whoever heard of a man catching a runaway car? I envisioned us driving to our grandmother's place. How surprised she would be to see us. It never occurred to me to wonder how we would ever cover those 200 miles to her home. We never had any trouble finding the way before. Why should we now?

"Nobody's coming yet," quavered Edith, kneeling on the seat, her face pressed against the back window. I looked around for one hopeful moment and turned back just in time to wrench the wheel and prevent us from clipping off a brick post and mowing down a length of hedge in front of someone's house. I guessed I'd better watch where I was going. We labored up out of the ditch and continued on to Grandmother's. I didn't dare take my eyes from the road, but I'm sure we were going a hot seven or eight miles an hour.

"I sorta believe someone's coming, " Edith remarked damply from the back seat. The next minute the door was jerked open and a man took the wheel from my willing hands. I noticed, as he turned the car around, that we had already gone almost half through Park View.

Some remark that the garageman made to me as we drove back put the notion into my head that what I had done wasn't the dumbest trick I had ever performed. Maybe my father would even think I was smart.

He and Mary were waiting when we got back, and as he talked a minute to the garageman, I thought I saw a flicker of pride in his eye. He crawled into the car and started for home while I waited smugly for him to say something.

He said, "Why didn't you pull the brake?"