Cats

Cats play a small but consequential role in the Duke family’s history. Edward’s devotion to his two striped pets, Casimir and Vaughn, shapes his household’s rules and contributes to the chain of events surrounding the fatal dinner-party fire; for Lavinia, meanwhile, the presence of cats makes the house physically unsafe, a conflict made more pointed by her tenderness toward birds.

Edward’s Companions and the Household

After his wife Lydia died, Edward doted on Casimir and Vaughn, two pampered striped cats. His attachment was strong enough to change the household’s former restrictions: when Lydia was alive, cats were not allowed in the dining room, but afterward Edward permitted the cats to roam more freely and even let them sleep on his bed. Mrs. Trame later recalled this change with grief, describing how Edward’s affection led him to allow what had previously been forbidden.

The cats’ status as favored members of the household also surfaces in the family’s business dealings. When James Duke, Lennart Vogel, and Armenius Breitsprecher sought Edward’s support, they proposed giving his cats catnip as a way to please him. The tactic reflected a simple, established fact about Edward: attention to Casimir and Vaughn could win his goodwill.

Lavinia’s Allergy and Her Refusal

At the dinner party celebrating the first Michigan cut, Lavinia declined to attend. Her reasons were not merely social. She said that being in a house where cats lived caused her eyes to swell and burn, made breathing difficult, and left her dizzy. The problem persisted even if the cats were put outside: she understood the house itself to retain what affected her. She reminded Edward that she had fallen ill after dining at his home before, and that her mother had kept their own house free of cats.

Edward dismissed her concern, suggesting that Mrs. Trame could put the cats in the garden. He also reproached Lavinia for showing greater regard for birds than for cats. His response turned a practical disagreement into a revealing contrast in their attachments. The dinner menu included thrushes, which Lavinia believed would be robins; she could not bear to see the birds served roasted. She would not expose herself to the cats’ presence, yet her refusal also reflected her care for the birds Edward’s celebration would consume.

The Fire and Its Aftermath

During the dinner party, Mrs. Trame twice chased the cats from the empty dining-room table. She later surmised that they had knocked over a candle on the sideboard while playing on the furniture. The account presents this as her explanation of how the fire may have begun, rather than as a proven cause. The blaze became fatal: Mrs. Trame and Chef Laliberte escaped, as did the two cats, while the dinner guests upstairs were caught in the fire. The cats survived the disaster that their presence in the house may have helped set in motion.

Mrs. Trame connected the fire to the household’s changed customs, remembering that the cats had been kept out of the dining room when Lydia was alive. Her account makes their survival inseparable from the loss around them: Casimir and Vaughn remained, while the permissive household Edward had built after his wife’s death ended in catastrophe. Edward and Freegrace, both already in their nineties, died in the fire; Posey and Lennart, though still in strong life, were also lost.

Recurrence and Significance

The cats’ role recurs beyond the fire in the novel’s treatment of family vulnerability. Years later, when typhoid swept through Cyrus Hempstead’s household and Chicago, Lavinia’s family suffered a further series of deaths. These later losses are not attributed to cats, but their appearance alongside the earlier disaster reinforces how the Duke family’s domestic spaces can become sites of danger and bereavement.

As a recurring presence, Cats expose the unequal weight Edward gives to different forms of life: he protects and indulges his pets, yet treats Lavinia’s illness and her concern for birds as matters to brush aside. Their place in the fire’s aftermath is therefore more than incidental. They embody the household’s changed order after Lydia’s death, and the collision between Edward’s affection, Lavinia’s limits, and the costs of carelessness.