Recent commentaries on the two narratives within Grace Paley’s “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life” offer mere outlines of the curious relationship between these stories: “The centricity of men and subordination of children changes with the two stories …” (Eckstein 128); “Husbands and boyfriends, although often welcome, are unreliable and transient. Children are much more constant family members …” (Taylor 80); “though the action of the stories foregrounds the comings and goings of the men in Faith’s life, the real focus is on the … relationship with her children” (Isaacs 25). Yet critics rarely question the structure of Paley’s paired narratives and the evident reversal of chronology in their ordering. That the events of the second story, “A Subject of Childhood,” precede those of the first, “The Used-Boy Raisers,” is evident in the peregrinations of Faith’s first husband, Pallid. Whereas Pallid in “A Subject of Childhood” resides in Africa (“on the gold coast of another continent” [140]), he has returned from there in “The Used-Boy Raisers.” Faith remarks in “The Used-Boy Raisers” that she has not seen her former lover, Clifford, in the two years since his bloodied departure in “A Subject of Childhood,” calling attention to the interval of time separating these stories. But why does Paley present these stories out of chronological order? Or, to be more accurate, why must the first of these stories present Faith’s relationship with her past and present husbands, Livid and Pallid, whereas the second recedes in time to describe in greater detail her role as the mother of Richard and Tonto? A possible solution to this question of chronology presents itself in the twin visions of these stories: as “The Used-Boy Raisers” moves toward a suggestive concluding image of separation and dispersal (husband and ex-husband departing), so “A Subject of Childhood” provides a counter-vision of unity—“that unifying memory out of childhood” (131), to borrow Pallid’s phrase—as Faith cradles Tonto in her arms in a beatific moment of near-religious resonance.

That Faith, during a kitchen-table debate in “The Used-Boy Raisers,” announces her belief in the Diaspora, “not only as a fact but a tenet” (131), proves central to her narratives. The Diaspora represents the historical frustration of Jewish desire for a stable home and homeland, a desire that Faith, a Jew herself, evinces in personal terms. Her home and family poised between dispersion and security, Faith seeks and continually returns to male-centered households—with Pallid and Clifford and Livid—only to have such seemingly steady situations dissolve with the husband or lover’s departure. Oddly, however, Faith is an anti-Zionist. Her comment upon the restoration of the Jews to Palestine, that “once they’re huddled in one little corner of the desert, they’re like anyone else” (132), becomes symbolically relevant to her own circumstances. Faith seems to recognize that she, like the Jews, converts adversity into moral distinction.

Both narratives end with domestic and comically reductive reenactments of the Diaspora. “The Used-Boy Raisers” closes with the dispersal of Livid and Pallid from the home, as they “set off in pride on paths which are not [Faith’s] concern” (134); another departure of male authority and loss of a stable home—another Diaspora—figures in “A Subject of Childhood” with the violent dissolution of Faith’s relationship with Clifford. Yet this state of dispersion, which leaves the home unstable and fatherless, becomes for Faith not only a means of defining herself as a mother but also a mode of aggrandizement. Faith finds the singularity that attends the departure of male authority from the home empowering. She must fulfill both maternal and paternal roles; she must develop self-reliance. Throughout “The Used-Boy Raisers” Faith works on an embroidery of a “ranch house that nestles in the shade of a cloud” (128). Whereas the embroidery of this cloud-nestled home is an idealistic, almost heavenly contrast to Faith’s own household, Faith, as the act of embroidering suggests, solely creates—or knits, to alter the metaphor into a similarly archetypal activity—a home for her sons, despite the dispersion of Livid and Pallid at the end of this story. Thus “A Subject of Childhood” concludes with the poignant moment when Faith cradles Tonto in a maternal gesture that, like her embroidery, compensates for the dissipation of male authority. In this little tableau Faith effectively defines “home” as the quasi-spiritual correspondence between mother and child.

The metaphor of imprisonment in the final image of Faith and Tonto—the author describes the heroine as “a black and white barred king in Alcatraz” (145)—echoes the Diaspora yet again, since, historically, the Diaspora commences with the Captivity of the Jews in Babylon. Within Faith’s re-vision of the Diaspora, the terms are reversed: lovers and husbands depart into freedom, not bondage. Though Faith remains imprisoned in the fatherless home, Paley elevates Faith’s stature within the circumstances of such abandonment, for Faith must supplement the lack that remains after Clifford’s departure, assuming the regal and male authority of a “king.” Emblematic of a kind of spiritual monarchy, Faith’s black and white stripes evoke comparisons with the tallith, the striped shawl worn by Jewish men at prayer. Ironically, the tallith is also worn by men and women during marriage ceremonies, at which time they are traditionally wished “a Long and Happy Life” (as one recalls from Paley’s “Goodbye and Good Luck”).

Though Paley’s use of the Diaspora explains the movement in these stories from dispersal to unity, the question of chronology remains problematic. The movement of these stories covers, in reverse, a history of Faith’s motherhood. The paired narratives regress not only toward that final silhouette of Faith holding Tonto but also to a more universal and historical vision of a mother cradling an infant, as Tonto places “his arm around [Faith’s] neck and curl[s] up right there in [her] lap, thumb in mouth, to be [her] baby” (144). Victoria Aarons notes that though “Paley’s fiction is grounded in Judaism … her stories speak even more powerfully to a universal human experience” (41). Small wonder, then, that one critic spies in this closing moment between Faith and Tonto “a living statue of a Pietà” (Isaacs 27). But such religious significance does not end here. Faith, as an archetypal mother, parallels Pallid’s “nervous old mother, the Church” (131), and the final image of this mother and her child in “A Subject of Childhood” becomes a restatement of “that unifying memory out of childhood” expressed by Pallid in “The Used-Boy Raisers” as he explains how he has never lost “faith” (131). In Pallid’s church, as well as in the home, there exists an original maternal force that inspires unity. Indeed, one may see in Faith the maternal repetition of “the passionate deed of Mary” (131). The potential for Faith’s “Long and Happy Life,” to look toward the larger title linking these stories, is understood only as her narratives move backward to a point of origin, to a concluding image—as Faith cradles the infant-like Tonto—that recapitulates Faith’s entrance into motherhood.

One may accuse Paley, in her reversal of chronology, of merely parading a postmodern device; Paley’s twin narratives, however, do not beg, like a puzzle, reconstruction, nor do they signal a conscious subversion of linearity and natural chronology. That Paley reverses the sequence suggests that, for Faith, these periods of dispersal and insulation are interchangeable, like the seemingly identical Livid and Pallid. The Diaspora, if considered in relation to the other stories within The Little Disturbances of Man, is thematically present throughout Paley’s collection. Aunt Rose’s narrative in “Goodbye and Good Luck” hinges upon Vlashkin’s repeated departures and her lingering singularity; in “A Woman, Young and Old” not only must Josephine’s mother fashion a home after abandonment, but young Josephine learns a humorous lesson in the loss of Corporal Brownstar. Closest in spirit and circumstance to Faith is Virginia of “An Interest in Life,” who endures the puzzling flight of the husband—for he is in some army: American, Brazilian, or Mexican—yet maintains a four-child home with visions of future maternal happiness. The backward movement of Faith’s narratives emphasizes her historical antecedents, those mothers who have preceded Faith and who, like Faith’s “chosen people,” are meant “to continue in time” (132).

Works Cited

Aarons, Victoria. “A Perfect Marginality: Public and Private Telling in the Stories of Grace Paley.” Studies in Short Fiction 27 (1990): 35–43.

Eckstein, Barbara. “Grace Paley’s Community: Gradual Epiphanies in the Meantime.” Politics and the Muse: Studies in the Politics of Recent American Literature. Ed. Adam J. Sorkin. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State UP, 1989. 124–41.

Isaacs, Neil D. Grace Paley: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Paley, Grace. The Little Disturbances of Man. New York: Viking, 1968.

———. “Two Short Sad Stories from a Long and Happy Life.” Little Disturbances 125–45.

Taylor, Jacqueline. Grace Paley: Illuminating the Dark Lives. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.