Naina Yeltsin's city highlights

Donnie Radcliffe

Washington Post

Naina Yeltsin, the secret weapon not on Boris Yeltsin's arms list, continued to capture Washington yesterday.

At the National Gallery of Art, Director J. Carter Brown rolled out the red carpet to show her samples of the gallery's temporary and permanent exhibitions of American and foreign art. She proved to be an attentive listener who could appreciate great art. But when Brown got to I.M. Pei and the world-renowned architect's concepts of spatial relationships, the former construction engineer knew exactly what he was talking about.

"The East Building just blew her away," Brown said afterward.

A little later at Mount Vernon, where she went for an all-ladies luncheon hosted by Barbara Bush, Mrs. Yeltsin and Mrs. Bush stood behind ropes like ordinary tourists to view the historic rooms in which America's first First Couple lived. Posing for official photographs in the bedroom where George Washington died, Naina Yeltsin seemed fascinated by curator Christine Meadows's revelation that the oversized 6 1/2-foot bed had been Martha's idea, not her husband's.

Last night, at a National Press Club reception, the Russian First Lady made a pitch for American help in raising $3 million to build a comprehensive center in Moscow for orphans and disabled children.

"We would like to reassure you that the help we get won't be wasted," she told some 200 people brought together by the sponsoring Frank Associates -- Child Assistance International of Bethesda. "We deliver it right to our children."

In remarks notable for their urgency as well as their brevity, she implored the audience to remember Russia's orphaned, disabled and disfigured youngsters, not all of them victims of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl.

According to Frank Associates co-founder Nina Kostina, many of the children are abandoned at birth by parents who do not want them because they are disabled. Naina Yeltsin was not aware that the 3-year-old presenting her a bouquet of flowers was one such child. Born with a cleft palate, Marina Mayes was adopted by Frank and Dorothy Mayes of Upper Marlboro and brought here two months ago.

At Mount Vernon, where luncheon was served on the piazza overlooking the Potomac, Naina Yeltsin found herself in the company of more than 60 women, described by the White House as "people Mrs. Bush thought Mrs. Yeltsin would like to meet."

That included Cabinet and congressional wives such as Bonita Derwinski, Susan Baker, Joanne Kemp, Lynda Robb and Antoinette Hatfield, television personalities such as Barbara Walters, Lark McCarthy and Maureen Bunyan, First Friends Pat Burch, Aileen Train, Sally Chapoton and Martha Zeder and First Relatives Dorothy Bush LeBlond and Margaret Bush.

The day's fashions were as varied as the shapes they were on. But two stood out -- Margaret Bush in white and Libbie Reilly in black, both in skirts doing their best to peek out from under thigh-length jackets.

Mrs. Bush wore a blue and white dress just at knee length, Naina Yeltsin a blue and green dress a few inches above her ankles and Marilyn Quayle, a black and white ensemble somewhere in between.

But it wasn't clothes that had occupied the two First Ladies in conversations they've had the past two days. Waiting for her guest to arrive, Mrs. Bush said they had "a lot to say about children, what's happening in Russia, what her job was. ... I tell her about the problems here and she says, 'You don't have problems.' "

Mrs. Bush said she invited Naina Yeltsin, whom she had met on two previous occasions, to Washington's home because "it's beautiful and it gets her out of the city. When I go to a foreign country I love it if I can get out of the city, off the beaten track."

Greeting each other with kisses and holding hands, the two First Ladies seemed at ease with one another although Naina Yeltsin told her hostess she had been nervous the evening before at the White House. "Oh, you weren't nervous," Mrs. Bush told her.

Luncheon consisted of chilled roasted pepper soup, cobb salad and chocolate tulips with lemon verbena and fresh berries, and a view the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association thought so spectacular that a member bought the opposite shore some years earlier to protect it from development.

For Naina Yeltsin, "Despite the fact that Washington is such a beautiful city, I have been captured foremost by the people." And as for what she would remember most of all, well, "Everything I have seen I have memorized," she told a reporter. "It is impossible to say one thing.