How to understand "was ever to make"

Question

The following is from the Godfather:

The Don was a real man at the age of twelve. Short, dark slender, living in the strange Moorish-looking village of Corleone in Sicily, he had been born Vito Adolini, but when strange men came to kill the son of the man they had murdered, his mother sent the young boy to America to stay with friends. And in the new land hi changed his name to Corleone to preserve some tie with his native village. It was one of the few gestures of sentiments he was ever to make.

How to understand the last phrase I emphasized?

Answer 1

Let's consider the part in question:

It was one of the few gestures of sentiments he was ever to make.

To understand this, you should look at it as a combination of two common patterns: be to do something and ever.

• be to do something can be "used about someone or something in the past to say what would happen at a later time"
• ever means "at any time"

Combine the two (he was to make and ever) together, and we get this meaning:

In his life (from this point in this story), he made only a few gestures of sentiments, and this was one of them (ever).