On a hot August day in 1956 in Greenwich Village. Tessa Castle, a struggling jazz singer with a traumatic past, opens her mailbox one day to find an envelope containing a wad of fifty-dollar bills, sent by an anonymous benefactor. Henry Wood, who fell in love with Tessa at first sight when she sang at his wedding four years ago, has been searching for her since his divorce. Leo Novak is an eccentric best-selling author suffering from a mysterious malady as well as writer's block. Robin Quigley, a private nurse looking for a husband, lives across the hall from Tessa.The lives of these four New Yorkers--all with their own difficult pasts--intertwine in a novel that encompasses the rise of rock & roll, Ike vs. Adlai, cardigan sweaters and white pumps, Yankee games on the radio, painting-by-numbers, the complications of family or lack of one, Dickens, Gershwin, twins, various wild coincidences, and-as promised by the title-those two elusive necessities, love and money.