The book is alive with such shifts. Clearly, he is both, and what is said about him depends entirely on which context you are emphasizing. Twenty-One Claremont is no longer ours. My husband's boyhood toys, my fragments of Chinese. Mothers have disappeared.
Wars come and go.
Now those little girls are grandmothers who must remember, after fifty years the doll, the chill, the tears. Greatness felled at a blow. Black and white apart. No sense of direction, we Americans. No place to go.