Dumped at the Courthouse, Married by Noon novel · Chapter 19 of 24
Chapter 19: The Saint Paul Hotel
The Founders' Dinner was held in the Grand Ballroom of the Saint Paul Hotel on the ninth of January.
It was twelve degrees outside, and the snow along Rice Park had frozen into dirty glass.
Inside, chandeliers hung from a ceiling the color of cream.
Three hundred people sat at round tables dressed in white linen, with candles and little bottles of Rausch lager at every place.
I wore a long dark-red dress that Liesl had insisted on buying.
I had told her no.
She had said, "It's not a payment. It's a dress. Wear it or I'll take the duck back."
I wore it.
Emmett wore a black suit and a bow tie that I had tied for him in the elevator, badly.
"You look like a man about to lose his company," I said.
"I look like a man about to dance."
"You can't dance."
"I'm told it's hereditary. Otto could."
"Then you'll get the second half of your heritage tonight."
Greta and the man she loved had arrived an hour earlier by the service door.
They sat at Table Four, with Liesl and a very nervous bread basket.
The hotel did not allow dogs.
Liesl had taken it as a personal insult.
At seven, the room quieted.
Lyle Voigt stood at the head table in a perfect black tuxedo, with his silver crew cut shining under the light.
His board sat in a row beside him.
His lawyer sat at his right hand.
The empty chair at his left, I noticed, was the one that should have been his daughter's.
"Good evening," he said into the microphone.
His voice carried to the walls.
"This dinner was started in 1951 by Otto Rausch, who believed that the trade ought to sit down together once a year and say its hardest truths over a good meal. It is a tradition I have honored for thirty years."
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