he wasn’t going to let a flirtatious girl derail him.
Genovese didn’t get the sense that Kristin loved Greg. As Kristin walked away from her down the hall that day, Genovese remembered thinking, “I don’t even know her.”
The Rossums wanted an outdoor June ceremony for their daughter. They also wanted to invite a hundred people. Greg didn’t like the idea of wearing a suit and tie in the summer sun, and he really didn’t want a big wedding.
Kristin had her own reservations about the wedding, but they were more emotional in nature. She told her mother she couldn’t decide whether Greg was the right man for her. He’d helped her so much over the years, getting her off drugs and supporting her as she put her life together, so she felt obligated to him. She even loved him. But she wasn’t sure she felt as deeply passionate about him as she was supposed to. Kristin told her that Greg wanted to be with her all the time. He didn’t seem to want her to have her own friends.
“Mom, I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I want to make sure I don’t make another one,” Constance recalled Kristin saying. “I want to make sure they’re the right reasons. Every time I look at him, he reminds me of my past.”
Constance suggested that both of them needed to develop their own sense of self, so they could continue to grow as individuals. She also said that wedding jitters were common.
“Remember,” she told Kristin, “you’ve been talking about getting married since you were eighteen.”
A year or so later, Kristin wrote in her diary that she thought she had “valid points and a deep-rooted reservation,” but she didn’t listen to the “inner voice” that told her to run away. Instead, she decided it was too late to break her commitment to Greg. She wished her mother had been more understanding and supportive, insistent, in fact, that they put off—or even call off—the wedding. If her own daughter didn’t want to go through with her wedding, Kristin wrote, she “would take her hand and drive her away to safety. I certainly wouldn’t imply that she had poor timing, and I wouldn’t ever give the idea that it is a tragedy that my planning and hard work was all put to waste.”
Finally, a couple of weeks before the wedding, Kristin called her mother and said she’d decided to go through with it. But the drama didn’t end there.
In the days before the ceremony, Constance said, Greg almost called off the wedding when he found out his father had been invited and had already flown in from Monte Carlo. Constance said she apologized to Greg for not being more sensitive to his feelings about his father.
The Rossums and Marie had invited Yves de Villers to the wedding after meeting with him for an introductory lunch during Lent. They were hoping to arrange a reconciliation between Greg and his father, at the very least for the sake of their future grandchildren. Greg was not pleased when he found out about the lunch, complaining that his mother and in-laws had gone behind his back.
Yves arrived a couple of days before the wedding and went with Marie to order a rented tuxedo. Greg got upset when he heard that Yves was in town. He hadn’t seen his father in quite some time, and he didn’t want that kind of distraction at his wedding. He wanted it to be a day of celebration. So he called Jerome and told him as much.
“I don’t want him messing anything up,” Greg said.
Jerome passed that sentiment on to their father.
The day of the rehearsal dinner, Bertrand and Yves ran some errands in Thousand Oaks and picked up the tuxedo that had been altered to fit Yves. Yves wanted to reestablish contact with Greg, but he was torn as to whether this was the best time to do so, especially given what Jerome had just told him. Yves said he forgot something back at the house, but Bertrand said they didn’t have time to go back because they were late. So, Yves asked to be let out of the car to take a walk. Ultimately, he decided not to attend.
June 5 was the perfect sunny day for a wedding, albeit a little humid. Because of the good weather, the ceremony was held under the larger of two gazebos in the olive tree–lined courtyard of the Padua Hills Theatre, an historic Spanish Colonial building nestled in the Mt. San Antonio foothills of northern Claremont.
As the guests assembled to watch Greg and Kristin exchange vows, a little blond girl handed out white roses to the women, while a string quartet performed a selection of Bach pieces.
Ralph walked his daughter up the aisle as she carried a bouquet of flowers that, from the photos, look like roses. She was beaming, as if she felt she’d made the right decision.
Because Kristin had no bridesmaids or maid of honor, Greg had two best men, his brother Jerome and Kristin’s brother Brent. Bertrand was the only groomsman.
The minister delivered a ceremony that was peppered with religious references as he spoke to the couple under the gazebo, with family and friends looking on from folding chairs.
“Marriage is not to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly, but reverently, deliberately, and in accordance with the purposes for which it was instituted by God,” the minister said.
He asked Kristin and Greg the usual questions, starting with the bride: “Kristin, will you have this man to be your husband, to live together in the covenant of marriage? Will you love him, comfort him, honor and keep him in sickness and in health and, forsaking all others, be faithful to him as long as you both shall live?”
“I will,” Kristin said sweetly, making a vow that would echo with irony in a matter of months. Greg made the same promise, repeating the words softly and with meaning. Then the minister led the guests in prayer and guided the couple through their final vows.
After the ceremony, the guests moved inside to the intimate dining room, which had once been used for dinner theater. There, amid the tables on the hardwood dance floor, Ralph welcomed Greg to the family. He noted that this was an international event that Marie’s sister, Marie-Paul, had come all the way from France to attend. The Rossums’ relatives, he noted, had flooded in from all over: Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Texas, Arizona, Utah, California, and Minnesota.
Jerome gave an awkward but heartfelt speech, eliciting laughter as he admitted that marriage was almost a foreign concept to him, so much so that he was shocked when Greg called him one day at his dorm and told him he’d asked Kristin to marry him.
“My brother has never hesitated on this marriage, and I’m just really proud of him,” he said. “I know relationships are a lot of hard work. It takes patience, just a lot of compromise.”
Greg had told him and showed him that “the rewards were all worth it. So, I guess,” he said, pausing to raise his glass, “Cheers.”
Brent Rossum made a short toast, making way for his father to stand up once more to share his feelings of pride about his daughter. He’d felt it while watching her physically conquer the role of the sugar plum fairy to such beautiful music, dancing with a professional in The Nutcracker all those years ago. A few weeks earlier, she was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa at SDSU. And with her marriage on this glorious sunny day, he said, she’d done it again.
Ralph said he also was proud of his new son-in-law and his expanded family, wishing the couple “a life of love, happiness, health, and success.”
Greg, the only one to take the floor and make a toast without a drink in his hand, introduced his mother and his aunt, then thanked Constance and Ralph for making the day, including the weather, so perfect.
“Kristin is the most wonderful
