Holly flees New York

Holly’s flight from New York is both an escape from a criminal case and a reckoning with the freedom she has long claimed for herself. She leaves rather than testify against Sally Tomato, but the departure’s decisive turn comes in Spanish Harlem, when she abandons her cat and then runs back, admitting their bond. The flight carries her away from the city; the cat’s disappearance makes the cost of leaving impossible to dismiss.

Causes and Decision

Holly lays out her departure as a practical itinerary: she will sleep until Saturday, go to the bank, collect a nightgown and her Mainbocher from the apartment, and report to Idlewild for a plane reservation she has already paid for. She insists that the trip is not a pursuit of José Ybarra-Jaegar. Brazil is simply somewhere she has never been, and a paid ticket, in her view, should not be wasted. Her claim that home is wherever one feels at home, followed by the admission that she is still looking, gives the journey a meaning beyond its destination.

The narrator reminds her that she is under criminal indictment and that jumping bail could mean imprisonment and make it impossible to return. Holly understands the danger, but believes the authorities have no real case against her and want her chiefly to testify against Sally Tomato. She refuses: whatever Sally’s past conduct toward her, she will not help the law pin him down. Loyalty, measured by how someone has treated her, outweighs the pressure to become a state’s witness. Her decision is not presented as a legal strategy that will clear her name; it is a choice to leave rather than give evidence against a person she calls a friend.

She also fears what public exposure would do to her prospects. Even an acquittal, she says, would leave her unwelcome in the neighborhood and without a future there. She resists an imagined domestic fate in which another woman takes her place, and describes the prospect of staying as a kind of personal bankruptcy. The departure thus answers several pressures at once: indictment, the demand for testimony, unwanted notoriety, and the sense that New York no longer offers her a viable place to live.

Preparations and Departure

Holly is in the hospital while she makes these plans. She asks the narrator to find a list of Brazil’s fifty richest men and to retrieve the St. Christopher medal he gave her. When visiting hours end, the practical arrangements take on urgency. On Saturday, as a violent storm sweeps the city, Holly avoids the brownstone because men are watching it; the narrator cannot tell whether they are police, reporters, or others interested in her case.

After leaving the hospital, Holly goes to a bank and then to Joe Bell’s bar. Joe sends word that she wants the narrator there quickly, with her jewelry, guitar, toiletries, a bottle of old brandy hidden in the dirty-laundry basket, and her cat. He doubts that helping her is wise and considers alerting the police, but still carries the message. The narrator climbs the fire escape between their apartments in driving rain to gather the requested belongings. Holly’s cat resists evacuation and scratches him; her things fill her suitcase and paper grocery bags, and the St. Christopher medal is among what he finds.

Getting the luggage to Joe Bell’s is a hazardous errand in its own right. The guitar fills with rain, the paper bags soften and split, perfume spills into the street, and pearls roll into the gutter. The cat scratches and screams from its makeshift carrier, while the narrator fears that unseen watchers will trap or imprison him for aiding someone who has fled the law. These physical mishaps make the escape feel less like a clean break than a precarious passage assembled from whatever the narrator can carry.

The storm continues on the day Holly leaves, with the city swaying under a squall-like downpour. The narrator doubts a plane can penetrate the weather, but Holly persists. In the limousine, she changes out of the riding costume she has not had a chance to replace, putting on a slim black dress. She drinks brandy and hums, while the narrator refrains from talking because conversation could provoke an argument. Her apparent attention to the passing streets seems at first like a last look at a place she wishes to remember; instead, she orders the driver to stop in Spanish Harlem.

The Cat and the Reversal

Holly takes the cat out of the car and sets him down among garbage cans, rats, and other street cats, telling herself that this is the right kind of place for an independent tough animal. When he does not leave but rubs against her leg, she insists that he go, then jumps back into the limousine and orders the driver to leave. The narrator calls her a bitch. A block later, Holly explains that she and the cat had met by the river and made no promises to each other. As she speaks, her voice falters and her face goes white.

At a traffic light she opens the door and runs back. The cat is gone. Holly searches the block, calling for him, while neighborhood children and onlookers watch. A boy appears with an old tomcat and offers it for money, but this is not her cat. When the limousine catches up, Holly has to grip the narrator’s arm to stand. Looking beyond him toward the boy and his offered animal, she acknowledges that she and her cat did belong to each other; he was hers.

The recognition reverses the logic of her attempted abandonment. Holly has treated independence as a reason to deny attachment and leave before anything can claim her. Once the cat is gone, she sees that a bond does not depend on promises having been made. The narrator promises to return and find him, extending the scene beyond Holly’s departure: the person leaving cannot repair the immediate loss, so the friend who remains accepts responsibility for the animal.

Holly’s admission is followed by a fear more profound than the one she associates with the mean reds. She says she is frightened by the prospect of not knowing what belongs to her until she has thrown it away; the cat, not the legal case or the imagined dangers of the city, makes that uncertainty concrete. She gets back into the car, still shivering, and asks the driver to go. The departure continues, but it no longer reads as uncomplicated liberation.

Aftermath and Significance

The press first reports that Sally Tomato is missing and that the actress in his drug case may have been the victim of gangland violence. Later it reports Holly traced to Rio. American authorities apparently make no effort to recover her, and the story fades into occasional gossip-column mentions. It returns to the news when Sally dies of a heart attack at Sing Sing on Christmas Day. His death closes the public thread of the case, but does not produce a reunion: months pass without a word from Holly.

The brownstone’s former life is dismantled while Holly is away. Its owner sells her possessions, including the white-satin bed, tapestry, and Gothic chair, and a new tenant moves in. The narrator’s account contrasts these concrete changes with the absence of news from Holly: her rooms and belongings can be redistributed, but her destination remains uncertain.

In spring, a postcard arrives, written in pencil and signed with a lipstick kiss. Holly reports that Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires was the best, nearly like Tiffany’s. She says she is attached to a wealthy man, though he has a wife and seven children, and is looking for somewhere to live; she cannot yet give an address. The postcard confirms that she has traveled onward but offers no settled homecoming or stable destination. The narrator wants to tell her that he has sold two stories, that the Trawlers are countersuing for divorce, and that he is moving out of the brownstone, but the absent address leaves these details unsent.

He does, however, keep the promise he made in Spanish Harlem. After weeks of searching the neighborhood and mistaking other flashes of striped fur for Holly’s cat, he finds him one cold, sunny winter Sunday in the window of a warm-looking room, among potted plants and clean lace curtains. The cat appears to have arrived somewhere he belongs. The ending does not establish where Holly has settled; instead, it places the possibility of belonging beside the unresolved journey. Her flight frees her from New York and its prosecution, while the found cat gives the narrator a tangible answer to the bond she recognized only after trying to leave it behind.