Samantha Barbour and Chance Barbour

Samantha Barbour and Chance Barbour are the parents of Andy, Kitsey, Platt, and Toddy, and the owners of a dark, opulent Park Avenue apartment that functions as a stage set for their carefully managed social life. Their marriage is a union of opposites held together by formal affection and mutual avoidance: she is a cool, blonde society figure of "masterpiece composure" whose stillness has "the magnetic pull of beauty" , while he is a prematurely white-haired, boyish man with a "queer unstable gray" gaze and a tendency to ramble about sailing and nautical flags . Together they present a united front of wealth and privilege, but the apartment's perpetual twilight—"never quite night there, or exactly day" —mirrors the emotional distance that structures their partnership.

Roles and Daily Life

Samantha runs the household with the efficiency of a stage manager. She breaks up visits from Theo's mother's friends when they "drag on too long" , fields calls from Social Services, and shields Theo from the press and from Enrique's relentless interrogations about his father's whereabouts (E00598–E00599). Chance, by contrast, is largely absent during the workweek, appearing only on weekends and in the evenings when he sits "with his napkin-wrapped glass of club soda, waiting for Mrs. Barbour to dress for their evening out" . Their interactions are courteous but impersonal; when Andy complains about sailing, Chance winks at Theo as if they share a joke, but Andy's mother "doesn't care for sailing either" , and the family's Sunday breakfasts are filled with Chance's rhapsodic monologues about the sea while the children roll their eyes or retreat into silence.

Chance Barbour's Illness and the Marriage's Hidden Strain

Chance's bipolar disorder—which Platt later describes as a "chemical imbalance" that first surfaced at Harvard Law, leading to an arrest for starting a fire and a stay in a "ding farm" —is the unspoken fault line beneath the family's polished surface. When he is on his medication, he is a "lamb" and a "wonderful father" , but the episodes return unpredictably: embarrassing late-night phone calls, romantic obsessions with younger women, and a manic period during which he invested more than fifty percent of the portfolio in a failing bank for "sentimental reasons" . Samantha manages these crises with the same controlled discretion she applies to everything else, but the strain is visible in her "frozen pauses" and "chilling and unreadable gaze" . When Theo encounters Chance on the street years later, the man is in the grip of mania, shouting "No more handouts!" and throwing off Theo's hand with "shocking violence" (E04646–E04647).

Widowhood and Withdrawal

After Chance and Andy drown together in a sailing accident off Northeast Harbor, Samantha retreats into her bedroom, emerging only rarely. She stops going out, stops having her hair done, stops accepting invitations . Platt describes her as seeing "hardly anyone" , and she spends her days in bed with needlework and two Yorkshire terriers, wearing a satin bed jacket pinned with a diamond snowflake brooch (E04223–E04225). The apartment's public rooms remain unchanged—"Chinese porcelains, lighted landscape paintings, silk-shaded lamps burning low" —but the life has drained out of them. She tells Theo, "I never thought I'd be quite so happy ever again" , and her joy at his engagement to Kitsey is the first genuine emotion she has displayed in months: "her startled eyes, then delight blooming unguarded on her cool, tired face" .

The Marriage's Narrative Significance

The Barbour marriage serves as a counterpoint to the novel's other, more openly dysfunctional relationships. Where Larry and Audrey Decker's marriage collapses into theft and abandonment, and Mr. Pavlikovsky's into drunken violence, the Barbours maintain a surface of decorum that is both a refuge and a prison. Samantha's composure is a form of survival—she "seemed to operate somehow above the constraints of New York City bureaucracy" —but it also isolates her from her children, especially Andy, whom she admits she "never saw for who he was" . Chance's death, when it comes, is almost a fulfillment of the romantic fatalism he always projected onto the sea: he was "son of Poseidon! Unsinkable!" , and his drowning is both a tragedy and a kind of poetic justice. Samantha's subsequent withdrawal is the final act of a woman who has spent her life managing appearances and has nothing left to manage.