Not right, nor orderly.

Mrs. Gordon and the "apple lady."

In “How to make a grand entrance” I mentioned that Mary and I lived on board the freighter Robin Gray for two days before it left the Brooklyn docks.  After supper on the first night, Mary and I were in the lounge talking with Fr. Conway when another passenger came through to poke around in the galley looking for an apple.  Father went over to help her look.  Mary and I went up to our room, exhausted from the emotional upheaval of saying goodbye to our families perhaps for the last time as we headed off to Kenya with no plans to return.  After we had left, she told him that she thought we should have offered her an apple from the fruit basket the Dominicans had given us.  If it had been downstairs with us, we probably would have.  But that we had it didn’t really register with us until Fr. Conway told us what she said the next day.  Ever after that we called her the “apple lady.”  

Fr. Conway told us what she said when he came up to our room on the morning of December 4 to say Mass.  We soon learned that he liked to gossip a bit.  He had permission from Cardinal Cushing to say much of the Mass in English.  He was also very open to letting Mary and me participate fully in the liturgy.  (Remember that in December 1965 the final session of the Second Vatican Council was just ending, so both of these were quite new to all three of us.)  Mary and I had been thinking of going into Manhattan for the day, where I wanted to go visit the Catholic Worker.  We ended up going into Brooklyn with Fr. Conway to buy some last minute supplies that might not be available where we were going.  Father had spent many years in the missions in Pakistan and had much advice for us greenhorns.  As we were to learn in all the other cities we visited with Fr. Conway, he knew people everywhere.  Needless to say he ran into a lady in the supermarket who was the mother of a man whom Father not only had taught, but who was also in Kenya teaching.  I remember feeling how mobbed the streets and stores were with pre-Christmas shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.  I noted in my diary, “It felt good to be near so many people.”  I think I was soaking in as much of the familiar as I could before we sailed off into the unknown.

During the days at the dock, Mary and I ate at the captain’s table along with Fr. Conway and a couple from Pennsylvania.  The wife was a travel agent so I think that the Robin Lines wanted to treat her well.  I don’t remember much about her husband, who was the quieter of the two.  About her I remember two incidents.  One morning she knocked on our door while Fr. Conway was still in his Mass vestments.  When I opened the door and she saw him, she reacted not with mere embarrassment at interrupting us but more as if she had walked in on a crime in progress.  She got out of there as quickly as she could.  The other time, she erupted angrily when Fr. Conway said something about hexagrams on Amish barns.  Whatever Father had said, it was incorrect in her view (I didn’t know any differently) and she wanted to be sure to correct what she saw as a widespread, ignorant belief about the Amish.

On the first morning at sea Mary and I came down late to breakfast because we had stayed up till after 2 a.m. watching the Statue of Liberty fade into the darkness.  Fr. Conway told us later that before we arrived the "apple lady" observed to the other lady at her table, loudly enough for everyone to hear, that it was awful that Mary and I had the suite.  After all we were mere children.  She and her table- and roommate, Mrs. Gordon, deserved the suite.  As luck would have it, Mary and I were now assigned to eat with Mrs. Gordon and the “apple lady.”  Three meals a day, for the next 18 days at sea, out of the sight of land and on a freighter with none of the distractions of a cruise liner.  

Here are the notes from my diary about Mrs. Gordon.  “Mrs. Gordon lives in Johannesburg and is extremely prejudiced—Arabs are dirty people.  We don’t let Arabs into South Africa because they’re Communists.  She is very defensive.  When I asked her if she had read any of Alan Paton’s books, she said that she hadn’t, but that I should form my own opinions about the treatment of Negroes in South Africa.”

In her manner of dress, her physical presence, her speech and behavior, Mrs. Gordon would remind you of Hyacinth Bucket on the TV show “Keeping Up Appearances.” 

I never recorded and don’t remember the real name of the “apple lady.”  It turned out that she was from Southern Rhodesia, whose white government had unilaterally declared its independence from Great Britain just the month before we sailed.  Mrs. Gordon sensed the world’s disapproval of South Africa, but she never displayed any indication that she thought that white rule there might ever end.  The “apple lady,” however, came from a territory where white rule was under siege from an armed insurrection and under economic sanctions from Great Britain and the United Nations.  Now I can see that this explains a lot about the chip on her shoulder.  At the time I was too young to understand someone I just saw as a bitter, old woman.  She was probably only in her late 40s, but I saw her as old.  Her attitudes certainly were atavistic.  She was shorter and had sharper features than Mrs. Gordon.  If Mrs. Gordon came across as the lumbering rhino, the "apple lady" played the hyena nipping at her heels.

Mary and I, Mrs. Gordon and the “apple lady” all tried to make the best of an awkward situation at each mealtime.  This turned into a campaign on their part to convince their young American tablemates of the wonders of South Africa and Southern Rhodesia, and on our part to maintain polite smiles and avoid arguments.  We were lectured on the beautiful landscapes of Rhodesia, the verdant fields of maize and tobacco, the riches of its mines producing asbestos, gold, coal, chrome, copper, cobalt, and lithium.  

The only time we were able to interrupt this stream of praise for the glories of Rhodesia was the morning I showed up at breakfast with my hair combed down in a Beatles haircut.  Unfortunately my unruly, curly Irish hair could not be kept combed straight for much longer than it took to eat breakfast, but at least it gave the two ladies something else to natter about that morning.

And so it went on until we were a day out of Cape Town, where our tablemates were disembarking.  Once again we were being regaled with anecdotes to prove how this or that product or feature of their respective countries proved the superiority of their way of life.  This time, however, Mrs. Gordon pronounced in all seriousness, “Of course, South African peanuts are the best peanuts in the world.”  I could no longer control myself at the absurdity of this declaration and burst out with a guffaw.  Luckily I didn’t spew the food in my mouth all over Mary, who was sitting across from me.  

Mrs. Gordon did not react with anger.  Rather she seemed genuinely hurt that I found her statement so ridiculous. I couldn’t deny my blatant reaction. The “apple lady” came to her defense, but only half-heartedly.  They both finally realized how they sounded to two young Americans.  In fact I think it finally dawned on them that Mary and I had been restraining ourselves for weeks.

Luckily we only had about another day of eating together before docking in Cape Town.  At least for that day Mary and I could eat in peace, and after the two ladies got off, we had the table to ourselves.  We didn't miss them.