I think I gasped. What was he trying to put into my body?
She settled the bottle back on the desk, her eyes growing narrow. "Since you say his 'nurse' or assistant or whatever she was gave you this, I suppose there's always the chance she made an innocent mistake. But still, what's he doing with this stuff at all? They manufacture it down in Mexico, and also, I've heard, somewhere in Central America, but it's not approved in the U.S. Anybody who dispenses this to a patient is putting their license at risk." She paused to give me one of those looks. "Assuming Alex Goddard even has a medical license. These 'alternative medicine' types sometimes claim they answer to a higher power, they're board-certified by God."
"I don't for a minute think it was an 'innocent mistake.' " I was beginning to feel terribly betrayed and violated. I also was getting mad as hell, my fingertips tingling. "But why would he give me these drugs at all? Did he somehow—?"
"I think you'd better ask him," she said passing me a bagel piled high with cream cheese and sturgeon.
She bit into her own bagel and for a while we both just chewed in silence. I, however, had just lost all my appetite. Alex Goddard who might well be my last chance for a baby, had just dispensed massive doses of illegal drugs to me. Which, my longtime ob/gyn was warning me, were both unnecessary and unethical.
"What do you think I should do?" I asked finally, breaking the silence but barely able to get my voice out.
She didn't say anything. She'd finished her bagel, and now she'd begun wrapping up the container of cream cheese, folding the wax paper back over the remaining sturgeon. I thought her silent treatment was her way of telling me my brunch consultation was over. She clearly was exasperated with me.
"Let me tell you a story," she said finally, as she carefully began putting the leftover sturgeon back into the Zabar's bag. "When I was eight years old all the Jews in our Polish ghetto were starving because the Nazis refused to give us food stamps. So my father bribed a Nazi officer to let him go out into the countryside to try to buy some eggs and flour, anything, just so we could eat. The farmer came that Saturday morning in a horse-drawn wagon to pick up my father. At the last minute, I asked to go with him and he let me. That night the Nazis liquidated our entire ghetto, almost five thousand people. No one else in my family survived. Not my mother, not my two sisters, not anyone."
Her voice had become totally dispassionate, matter-of- fact, as though repression of the horror was the only way a sane person could deal with it. She could just as easily have been describing a country outing as she continued. I did notice, however, that her East European accent had suddenly become very prominent, as though she was returning there in her thoughts.
"When we learned what had happened, my father asked the farmer we were visiting to go to a certain rural doctor we knew and beg him to give us some poison, so we could commit suicide before the Nazis got us too. The doctor, however, told him he had only enough poison for his own family. He did, however, give him a prescription for us. But when my father begged that farmer to go to a pharmacy and get the poison, he and his entire family refused. Instead, they hid us in their barn for over a year, even though they knew it meant a firing squad if the Nazis found us." She glared at me. "Do you understand what I'm saying? They told us that if we wanted to do something foolish because we were desperate, we would have to do it without their help."