Mercédès

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a Vienna drawing room: a clock, a curtain, a distant engine)
She was ten years old. Start there. She was ten.

[Verse 1]
Emil Jellinek sold motor cars and raced them for the sport,
and when he entered a race he liked to enter under a name
that wasn't his, for the fun of it, for the mystery of it —
so he used his daughter's. Mercédès. She was ten.
And he won. And the cars got faster. And he asked the manufacturer
to put the name on the whole line. And they did.

[Chorus]
Mercédès Jellinek. She was a girl in Vienna.
She had no share in it. She had no say in it. She had nothing.
The name on the most prestigious badge in all of motoring
belonged to a child who was not consulted and was not paid.
Mercédès Jellinek. Eighteen eighty-nine
to nineteen twenty-nine. Thirty-nine years old.

[Verse 2]
She married an Austrian baron. That went badly.
She married a sculptor after that. That went badly too.
She had children. She had illnesses. She had very little money
by the end of it, in Vienna, in a flat, in the twenties.
And the cars went by outside with her name across the front
and she was not in any way connected to a single one of them.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And she is the third daughter on these records, if you're counting:
Sara Lee, who was eight. Melinda Lou, who was eight.
And Mercédès, who was ten, and got the grandest of the three,
and of the three she is the only one who died with nothing.
Fathers naming things for daughters is a tender act.
It is also a transfer of property. Both. Always both.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the engine, passing, gone)
She was ten.
Nobody asked her. She was ten years old.