Children become involved in marital conflicts

The Roses’ children are not peripheral to their parents’ divorce: they become its witnesses, messengers, concealed confidants, and—within the adults’ legal strategy—possible grounds for excluding a parent from the house. Eve and Josh are repeatedly told that the separation will be civilized, yet they live inside a home where hostility replaces the security and apparent partnership that had defined family life. Their position exposes the distance between the parents’ claims to protect them and the conflict that makes them feel responsible for preventing catastrophe.

Family Life Before the Separation

The children’s changing needs form part of the background to Barbara Rose’s attempt to establish a life of her own. As Eve and Josh demanded less of her time, Barbara began considering commercial cooking, drawing on her mother’s example and her own experience working with professional cooks and bakers during summer vacations. Her aspirations emerged within a marriage in which she had also devoted substantial effort to Oliver Rose’s career, their household, and the children. The shift toward independence therefore altered more than Barbara’s work: it challenged the family arrangement in which her identity and labor had been organized around the home.

The house had embodied the couple’s shared life. Oliver and Barbara Rose had built its kitchen with Barbara’s catering ambitions in mind, and Oliver applied his electrical knowledge and craftsmanship to the construction. Their children grew up amid the results of that joint work and the parents’ shared investment in the home. When Oliver discussed settlement with Murray Goldstein, he treated the house and its antiques as the accumulated product of their life together, estimating the house’s value at at least half a million dollars and the possessions at another half-million or more. He initially offered to accept half the value. That apparent willingness to divide the property did not mean the children could remain untouched by the dispute: their home, their parents’ shared history, and the conditions of their daily life were all bound together in the asset being contested.

Separation Becomes a Family Crisis

Eve learned of the separation from Barbara and tried to make sense of it with Ann, who cared for the children. Barbara had described her decision as a declaration of independence, explaining that she wanted to fulfill her own aspirations and no longer be an appendage. She assured Eve that her relationship with her father would not be affected and that the split would remain civilized. For Eve, however, the announcement overturned the family’s public image. She had believed her parents had an unusually good marriage because they did so much together, including making a home together. Her deepest distress was not simply that they were separating; it was that her mother had not been happy with her father, a fact that made the family she thought she understood suddenly seem unknowable.

Ann initially hoped the separation was temporary, but Eve rejected the idea that her parents were having an ordinary spat. The children first tried, indirectly, to bring Oliver and Barbara back together. As their parents’ hostility persisted, that effort gave way to grudging acceptance. Eve spent more time with friends and less under Ann’s supervision; Josh found an outlet in basketball and other sports, while continuing to see his father. These different responses did not resolve the strain. They show the children adapting around a conflict they could neither explain nor control.

Eve later told Ann that she would not go to camp. She suspected that her parents wanted to send the children away so they would be removed from the atmosphere at home, but her private reason was fear of leaving Oliver and Barbara alone together. She asked Ann to keep that fear secret. Eve wanted either a reconciliation or a separation that would physically remove one side of the family from the house; she even wished that the parents would sell it and end the standoff. To her, the family seemed to have ceased to exist except as people occupying one building. Her account makes the house’s double meaning plain: it was the shared center of family life, but continued cohabitation under hostile conditions made it feel like no family at all.

Children in the Adults’ Conflict

The children’s welfare also enters the divorce as a legal argument. When Oliver sought advice from Goldstein, the lawyer warned that an affair with Ann could be used to portray Oliver as an unfit father and a moral threat to the children. The allegation, Goldstein explained, could support an injunction intended to force Oliver out of the house; Ann, who was involved in the children’s care, could be drawn into the case as well. Oliver objected that she was an innocent bystander. Goldstein’s warning thus reveals how readily the children’s well-being could be invoked as a weapon in the contest over the home, even when the legal maneuver would expose them to further conflict.

Goldstein also urged Oliver not to publicize the affair or invite a courtroom fight that could involve the children. He argued that a confrontation would risk making them part of a case about whether their father was a bad influence. His advice rested partly on the belief that Barbara would not endanger her reputation as a good mother, and partly on his judgment that Oliver’s work and travel made a custody fight undesirable. The children appear here not as abstract beneficiaries of legal protection but as people whose family relationships could be used to pressure either parent and whose exposure to the dispute might itself cause harm.

Eve’s private appeals to Ann show the emotional labor that this adult strategy places on a child. She asked Ann to persuade Oliver not to send her and Josh to camp, even suggesting that Ann tell him the children were in a bad crowd, smoking marijuana, and needed parental supervision. She explicitly did not want Ann to tell him the real reason: Eve feared what her parents might do to one another if left alone. She believed that she and Josh were the barrier keeping their parents from tearing each other apart. The request makes Eve both a frightened daughter and a strategist, devising a cover story because she thinks the truth will not otherwise protect the family.

Oliver, for his part, said he wanted to send the children away because the atmosphere at home was intolerable and he believed distance would spare them from living through it. Ann disagreed that camp was the right choice, but Oliver was adamant and described the decision as what he thought best for both children. The disagreement captures the ambiguity of parental protection in the novel: removing Eve and Josh might shield them from daily hostility, but Eve experiences that removal as abandonment of the house at the moment she believes it needs watching. Their parents’ opposing interpretations leave the children with responsibility but little power.

Separation, Absence, and the Cost to the Children

When the children left for camp from Sidwell Friends School, Oliver followed Barbara’s station wagon in his Ferrari. Eve’s eyes were still puffy after saying goodbye to Ann, who had moved to the YWCA on Seventeenth Street. The farewell put the adults’ conflict and the children’s attachments in the same scene: the children were being sent away from their parents’ household, while their caregiver had already left it. Oliver and Barbara watched the bus depart and continued waving after it was out of sight. Josh privately told Oliver that he wished his parents would either make up or make peace. Oliver hugged him, felt regret, and then struggled with the fact that Josh and Eve shared Barbara’s genes. The thought troubled him as an unworthy feeling, but it nevertheless diminished his capacity to experience his children apart from his anger toward their mother. Seeing Barbara embrace them before they boarded also disturbed him. The children’s departure therefore brought not relief but a visible measure of what the separation had already cost the family.

Their removal did not end the children’s fear. Three weeks later, Eve told Ann that neither parent had contacted them and that Josh was a nervous wreck. The telephone at home had been disconnected; Eve had sent a telegram that came back undeliverable, and neither grandmother had heard from Oliver or Barbara. Eve insisted that whatever had happened between her parents, they were still their children. She began to cry and threatened to return home to see for herself. Ann promised to find the parents and make them call, while privately recognizing that she needed to keep the children away from the dangerous house. The silence transformed the original fear of being sent away into a new fear of being forgotten or unable to reach either parent.

Across these episodes, the children are pulled into the divorce through different forms of entanglement: they are the stated reason for restraint in Goldstein’s legal advice, the audience for Barbara’s explanation, the secret-keepers of Eve’s fear, the subjects of Oliver’s decision to send them away, and the ones left waiting when their parents disappear from contact. Their hope that Oliver and Barbara might reconcile eventually gives way to the more modest wish that the adults make peace. That change marks the central consequence of the conflict for Eve and Josh: the security once associated with a shared home and apparently united parents is replaced by vigilance, separation, and uncertainty about whether either parent will answer.