Free Mission Flats by William Landay

able to minimize it somehow. Or at least to compartmentalize it, as the euphemism goes. (We say compartmentalize when we mean ignore or blow off.) Maybe it was just the selfishness of a twenty-something; I could not bear to rouse myself from the hermetic life of a student. More likely, I could not accept that Mum was ‘not there anymore.’ The reports from Dad just did not fit. In my mind’s eye, Annie Truman was always and very much all there.
    But when I came home for Christmas break that year – after an absence of six months – I was brought up short by the reality of it. The slippage.
    At first the changes were not startling. If you’d seen her, you would not have noticed anything obviously wrong. My mother was still an elegant-looking woman, effortlessly slim and ‘put together’ (her phrase, not mine). She had a new pair of designer eyeglasses, for which she’d made the long trip to Portland twice, to order them and to pick them up. Those vivid blue eyes had not faded. Her face had aged a little. The skin had shrunk over the facial bones and you could just make out the longitudinal curve of the eyeballs. Still she was extraordinarily lovely.
    To me, though, there were subtle but noticeable changes. She spoke less and resisted being drawn into conversation. She seemed to have determined that there was a risk of embarrassment in speaking and decided the safer course was to say as little as possible. There were occasional memory lapses, nothing shocking but unlike her. (Every morning she greeted me with the vague exclamation ‘Ben!’ as if she were surprised to find me home.) What I saw at first was not a sudden, violent transformation in my mother, but a shift in mood. A sense of dullness and withdrawal about her, remarkable only because Anne Truman had never been remotely dull or withdrawn in her life.
    Because the university virtually shuts down over the holidays, I was at home for several weeks that December. Family custom dictated that I work as a temporary at the department, but my real job was to look after Mum. By this point, Claude Truman had had just about enough of his wife. From the start, he was spectacularly unfit for the task of caring for an Alzheimer’s patient. He was still The Chief, nearing the end of his glorious reign, floating along on an argosy of self-satisfaction. Is that too unkind? Maybe. Alzheimer’s imposes a burden on the spouse, and maybe it is unreasonable to demand that every spouse be equal to the challenge. Better to say, Claude had always been able to nourish himself from within, and now he simply could not understand how his wife, who’d once had the same knack, had mysteriously become so ravenous.
    So for a few weeks I put on a uniform and worked a detail as Anne Truman’s bodyguard, a happy enough arrangement. I learned the various strategies Mum and Dad had improvised for protecting her. There were yellow stick-on notes posted throughout the house – CHECK OVEN , they said, or TURN OFF LIGHTS or KEYS ON PHONE TABLE – and I began to add my own notes rather than nag her, which wounded her leonine pride. To prevent her from wandering, I took her on long walks every morning and afternoon to tire her out. For good measure, I was told, I should install a second lock on each of the house doors, keyed from the inside. This I refused to do. It smacked too much of imprisonment. I did hide the car keys, though, just in case.
    The hardest moments were in simple conversation.
    ‘Do you have . . . ?’
    ‘Do I have what, Mum?’
    ‘Never mind. It’s not important.’
    ‘No, what is it?’
    ‘I don’t know – I can’t—’
    ‘Go ahead, Mum, it’s alright. Do I have what?’
    ‘Ben.’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘What do you . . . ?’
    ‘I’m in school, Mum.’
    ‘Of course. Of course, I knew that.’
    Word-finding troubles were particularly infuriating for her. Over and over, she would pause in mid-sentence, suspended, unable to grasp the word she needed. If we were