When smart and beautiful Athena Van Fleet attends her sister’s wedding, she encounters John Pickett, the officiating priest whom she knew as a student in college. Now married to tennis star, Ted Talbot, who is retired with an injured knee, she moves to Newport when her husband is named President of the Tennis Hall of Fame. Smitten by Pickett, Athena uses her sway as the daughter of a bishop to secure the young priest an improbable call as rector of the wealthy Newport parish.
As Ted begins to sense Athena’s enchantment, he jealously makes Pickett his prey. Then unaccountably, the penniless priest becomes proprietor of Rosecliff mansion—igniting rumors up and down the Eastern Seaboard that the priest is a tycoon or a drug lord. Narrator Brooke Adams, feeling like a “bystander implicated at the scene of the crime,” watches as Pickett’s incredible scheme is unraveled to an unintended end.
From the sad abandoned mill towns of industrial New England to the hunt fields and ballrooms of Newport, from an aged acolyte in rural Massachusetts to pretentious Park Avenue bishops, and from the shining spectacle of the Champs-Élysées to the elusive Bishop’s House in Providence, Pickett’s Dream is borne from the Yuppie Go-Go 80’s to the mean streets of our time, and the innocence of a heretical dreamer to the world we find ourselves in.
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