When the United States entered the war, Paul was drafted. Just a few months of training broke down his health to such an extent that he was given a medical discharge for a heart condition and sent home, where Dr. Rossi visited him and said he wouldn’t last the year unless he went west and had a complete rest in the sunshine of Arizona. Pauline Colombo insisted that their marriage take place before he left. She refused to believe he wouldn’t get well, and her stubbornness earned the enduring respect of Umbertina, who had always understood defiance as a necessary tool of life. Paul, who was supported by the family when he and Pauline were married and he was out West recovering his health, was never to see his father again.

As Serafino grew weaker, something seemed to give way inside him, as if his sweet nature had finally been apprised of the horrors and treacheries of life. At times the old man’s mind would wander and tears would come to his eyes as he remembered the years of his youth, the loneliness and the hardship. It was as if the scars of those years were opened and throbbing with the pain of what was past.

Umbertina no longer reproved him when the tears came to his eyes and his voice choked as he said in his rough dialect of the hills, “It was a tough life . . . all alone in the mountains . . . working months and months without stop on the railroad.”

Toward the end he spoke only in dialect, his English words forgotten, and he spoke rarely. “Why did Christ let me suffer so . . . was it worth it all just to make money? Just to end up an old man like this?” He would repeat the same phrases over and over.

At first Umbertina had countered this rambling by saying, “But you have your family, your home. What more does a man want?” Then she realized that he was not listening or hearing, that her words made no impression, for he had slipped back to another time when he had nothing.

Just as abruptly he would come back to the present and say, “Domenico was right—we should have all worked together as in Garibaldi’s day when we had some hope. Instead we worked for ourselves. All that hard work . . . that tough life . . . and all you have at the end is money.”

He who had been the mildest of men even in adversity refused to go to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel anymore. “What the priest says I’ve heard before,” he said.